About
Who builds this, and why.
Perdura is small on purpose. Most families build their memorial themselves, with tools made to carry the writing. When someone would rather not, a person does it for them, and that person read every word.
The reason
With my mother, we knew it was coming
I built this for my mother first.
Rebecca died in 2025, at sixty-nine. We had warning. A terminal illness showed itself when she was in her early sixties, so we did the thing you do when you can see it coming: we started writing everything down while she could still tell us herself.
Her garden. The stray cats she fed, every one of them. Four sons and a daughter. A woman who had spent her whole life looking after other people.
That work is why I needed somewhere for it to go. Notes on a phone and a folder of scans are not a place. They last as long as the phone does.
Nobody wrote anything down for Doug
Then I went looking for my uncle Doug.
Doug died in 1986, at thirty-two. Nobody wrote anything down. There was no reason to think you had to.
My aunts can tell me about the brother who grew up in their house. They can't tell me much about the man who left it. His friends, his hobbies, how he spent his time, what took him to Oklahoma City. That part of his life was his own, and most of it went with him.
I don't know what his voice sounded like.
What I do have came from a stranger. I found Levi through Prime Timers, a group for older gay men in Oklahoma City, and he left this on Doug's page.
Doug wasn't a big talker and he was a gentle soul. If you were upset about anything, just being around him would calm you down.
Forty years later, from someone outside the family. It is the closest I have come to knowing what my uncle was like.
His mother and his sisters sewed his name into the AIDS Memorial Quilt so he would not be forgotten. This is the same impulse, in a form the people still looking for him can find. If someone who knew Doug goes searching for his name, he is there, and they can leave what they remember.
Why Perdura exists
Two people in one family. With my mother we had warning and we used it.
We have some memories. We wish we had more. That's the whole reason this exists, so the people who come after you aren't left with whatever happened to survive.
Rebecca Lynn Wallace
Built with years of warning, while she could still tell us · 1956–2025
Visit Rebecca’s memorialDouglas Eugene Wallace
Rebuilt forty years late, from his sisters and one friend · 1954–1986
Visit Douglas’s memorial
Perdura is the company and the address memorials live at. Every page, whether a family built it themselves or we built it with them, publishes at its own web address, and the family keeps a complete copy of the archive to hold on to. What we do and what we haven't built yet are both set out on the promise.
I have been building websites since 2001, most of them at the American Academy of Family Physicians. Their journals were still on paper when I got there, and I spent years on the move to digital, mostly in quality assurance and SEO. The part I still think about is familydoctor.org, which took what family doctors were reading and turned it into something a patient could use. I run Garrett Digital now, and the work keeps landing in the same place: we built Research to Real World for the University of Kansas, which does that job for classroom research.
I started Perdura after building memorials for my own family, and then watching other families lose things because nobody was left who knew where they were kept. An obituary is a few paragraphs. I want the grandkids, and the nieces and nephews, and the people in a family who are not born yet, to get more than that. I am not a funeral director and have never worked in the industry. If something looks wrong to you, tell me and I will fix it.
Editorial standards
How we write about a life
- 01
Nothing invented
Every fact on a memorial comes from the family or a source they gave us. We never guess a date, a relationship, or a detail, not even a plausible one.
- 02
Their words, kept
When someone contributes a memory, it stays in their voice. We tidy typos, not meaning.
- 03
You approve everything
Nothing publishes until the family has read it, and nothing a friend contributes appears until you say so.
- 04
Nothing sold to visitors
No ads, no flowers, no upsells on a memorial page. Ever. You pay once, and their visitors are never a product.
- 05
A person answers
Our team is in the United States and help never costs extra. A person reads what you wrote and replies.
Get in touch
The fastest way to reach a person is to tell us who you want to remember, or start one yourself. If you would rather talk, call (512) 730-0250.