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I remember introducing Kickstarter to my Dad. I saw the Light Phone, it was a minimalistic phone that was supposed to help you live in the moment without those distractions of Emails, Facebook, Whatsapp etc. A bare basic phone, something I felt my parents could use. There were no bells and whistles for them to get confused with, just a “dial a number” phone. So I gave him the link and that was the last I spoke to my Dad about Kickstarter. Unbeknownst to me he started to find quite a few products.

After my Dad died, sorting through his affairs I found a number of Kickstarter projects that he had backed that had still not be fulfilled, and sure enough the Light Phone came through and it made me both smile and cry. When you loose someone you love, you scavenge around for things that help you remind you of them, belongings, writing, pictures, anything to cling to for fear of forgetting them and truly loosing them forever.

The slow trickle of Kickstarter products where like a crutch, it helped me to bear the weight of reality until I was ready to face it for myself again, the truth that my father was gone. These were things that when he was alive he saw promise in, something he found interesting or exciting and so when they came through to me I felt like I saw the world through his eyes, if only for a few minutes.

Dad backed a product called Dopple it was a watch like device that sends a little pulse vibration on the inside of your wrist, like a lub dub of a heart beat and the experience is similar to listening to music. If you listen to slower beats you feel more relaxed and calm, when you listen to something faster it keeps you more alert and pumped. When the Dopple came through I began to see these products as almost gifts from the grave.

When Dad was alive if I was stressed or had problems that had the potential to overwhelm me, I would call him, someone to talk to, a different point of view. He would calm me down, make everything feel like it was going to be alright. Now these phone calls can no longer happen, but when I need that voice on the end of the line, I can put on the Dopple and set it to a slow and calming pace, a heartbeat, that can help remind me of those conversations and give me the sense that he is closer than ever.

The last project to be fulfilled was the one that really knocked me off my feet. Now before I discovered that he backed these projects, in those first hard few months after he passed, I would find comfort in looking up at the moon. In my darkest of times it was the light. I began to associate the moon with my Father as a beautiful but silence presence that forever watched over me, but something that I always took for granted. How many times do we look up at the moon and just look at it ? We don’t.

So you can somewhat imagine how I felt when I discovered that he backed a moon watch! The Bovarro Lunar Series. The watch has a little mini moon on it, something that I can wear on my wrist and always look to, regardless of if its day or night. I think I just sat there for a while. The watch itself was a perfect, last gift. You can’t be on crutches forever and at some point I needed to truly acknowledge that he was gone. Now I am almost there but not quite. The watch serves as a nice reminder that time is very much limited. When I hear the ticking of the watch I am reminded that you can never know when your time is up, and so you should be spending the time, doing the things that you love, with the people and family whose company that you cherish.

As for the memories of my Dad that the Kickstarter projects rekindled every time one would come through, when they eventually stopped I began to realise that they were not memories of him. They were memories that I was creating which in turn made me realise that I am reminded of my father because I am myself a reminder of the man that he was.

It just took a while and a few Kickstarter projects to realise something that I already knew.

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