A Starting Point

We started building Pass It On because we kept watching the same thing happen, in different families, to different people, for the same underlying reason.

A parent dies. The house is full. The will divides the property — house to one sibling, accounts split three ways, the rest “in equal shares” — and the lawyer’s office closes the matter in an afternoon. And then, weeks later, the actual inheritance begins: a long, quiet sort through forty years of objects, almost none of which were named in any document, almost all of which carried, somewhere, a reason they’d been kept.

The reasons are what we wanted somewhere to put.

Wills are good at what they were built to do. They direct property. They name an executor. They satisfy a court. They are, by design, terse — every word is a place a lawyer can be argued at later, so the document tightens itself toward what it absolutely must say and stops there. That’s the right shape for a legal instrument. It is the wrong shape for the question why did Dad keep this watch.

The question why has a different shape. It rambles. It involves a person who is dead now. It is full of I think and probably and the year we moved to the house with the porch. It will not survive a notary. It will barely survive a Thursday.

The thing we kept noticing was that families weren’t fighting over the property — not really. They were fighting over the absence of the reason. Two siblings, both certain mom had promised them the same teacup, are not really arguing about the teacup. They are arguing about who knew her better. The teacup is a token. The argument is grief looking for a place to land. And almost every one of those arguments, traced backward, would have been settled by a single sentence written down once.

So we are building a place for the sentence.

The product is straightforward — a private list of the things you’d want named, with a story attached to each, encrypted in a way that means we couldn’t read it even if we tried. The technology is the easy part. The hard part is the cultural one: convincing anyone that this is worth an hour of their time before they need it to be.

We don’t have a complete answer to that yet. We have a hypothesis, which is that story is a better unit of inheritance than list, and that families who treat it that way fight less and remember more. This blog will be where we put what we learn as we test that.

If you’ve sat at a kitchen table and tried to remember why your mother kept the bowl, you already know what we mean.