She's live

I published Skylar's memorial today. Hit the button and just sat there for a minute.

It's a weird feeling. I've been building this thing for weeks — late nights, weekends, staring at code until my eyes blur. And the whole time, technically, I was building a product. A platform. Something for other people. But the truth is, I was building it for her first.

Every feature I added, I was thinking about Skylar. When I built the photo gallery, I was scrolling through 13 years of her photos trying to pick the best ones. When I wrote the tribute system, I was testing it with her name, her story, her weird habits. When I added the memory wall, I was thinking about the people in her life who loved her too — and wishing they had a place to say so.

She was the first memorial on this platform, and she always will be.

Grief needs somewhere to go

I said this in an earlier post, but it's more true now than when I wrote it. The hardest part of losing Skylar wasn't the sadness — it was the restlessness. The feeling of wanting to do something and having nothing to do. The routines were gone. The purpose was gone. And you can only sit with that for so long before you need to put the energy somewhere.

Building this was where I put it. Every line of code was a way to stay close to her without just sitting in the grief. And I don't mean that in a poetic way — I mean literally, working on a memorial platform means you spend your days thinking about how to honor a pet's life. That's not a bad place to be when you're missing yours.

The moment it became real

There's a difference between building something and shipping it. For weeks, Skylar's memorial existed in draft mode — photos uploaded, tribute written, everything in place, but unpublished. Just mine. And there was something safe about that.

Publishing it made it real in a different way. It's out there now. Anyone can see it. People can light a candle, leave a memory, look at her photos. She's not just in my phone anymore — she has a place on the internet that's hers.

I'm proud of that. I'm proud of her page. I think she'd be annoyed by the attention, honestly — she was more of a "demand affection on her own terms" kind of dog. But I think she'd also like that people can see how beautiful she was.

Building for other people now

The thing that surprised me most about this project is how much it changed along the way. I started building it because I needed it. But the more I worked on it, the more I thought about the other people who need it too — the person who just lost their cat of 18 years, the family whose dog got sick too fast, the kid who lost their first pet and doesn't know what to do with that feeling.

I wanted to make something that would actually help. Not a generic sympathy card. Not a Facebook post that disappears in a feed. Something lasting. A place where you can go back to on the hard days and see their face and remember the good parts.

That's what this is now. And it started with a husky named Skylar who had opinions about everything and made my life better for 13 and a half years.

If you're going through it right now — I'm sorry. I know. And if you want to build something for them, the door's open.

— Meagan, founder of RememberMyPet.ai