Why this exists

In October 2025 I went into hospital with severe abdominal pain. I came out of emergency surgery with an ileostomy and a Stage 4 diagnosis: Signet Ring Cell Carcinoma. It took less than a hundred hours to go from an ordinary week to a completely different life.

I got through the first round of treatment and came out the other side in February. In two weeks I start the next one.

What I remember most clearly from those first days is not fear, exactly. It was a kind of inventory. I kept turning over the things I had not said to people, and how close I had just come to never saying them. Not dramatic things. Ordinary ones — the kind you assume you will get around to, because there is always going to be a Christmas, or a phone call, or a better moment than this one.

There is not always a better moment. That is the part nobody tells you until you are already in it.

So I built this. I have tried to live my whole life with nothing left unsaid, and this is one more way to make sure I keep doing it.

Why a website, and not a letter in a drawer

A drawer only works if somebody opens it, and only reaches the people who are near enough to be in the house. Some of the people I most wanted to write to are ones I see rarely — relatives at a distance, people I have never quite found the moment with. There is never a natural occasion to say the real thing to someone you see twice a decade. So it stays unsaid, and then one day it is too late to say it at all.

This is a way to write it down anyway, and to be sure it arrives.

Why it does not cost anything

Everything like this wants a subscription. I could not do it. I cannot imagine somebody’s letters failing to reach their children because a card expired, or a bank reissued a number, or some administrative nonsense that has nothing to do with anything that matters. That is an unbearable way for a promise to break — and it would break at exactly the moment nobody is left to fix it. The one person who could update that card is the one who died.

So the free tier is a real product, not a trial. If you want to remove the limits, it is pay what you want, from a dollar, once, for as long as this service exists. There is no renewal and nothing to forget to cancel. I am not trying to make money from this. I am trying to make sure it still works in twenty years.

Why give it away

If I was going to build this for myself, it seemed obvious to build it properly and hand it to everybody else as well. There is no version of this where I make something that would have helped me and then keep it.

So it is a legacy piece rather than a business — made, as we say at Qualeto, to outlive its making. I have spent my life building bridges. This is one more, and it may be the one that matters most.

Not for profit. Just a proper way to say goodbye.

— Q
September 2026

Farewell Notes is operated by Qualeto. The Quartermaster Foundation is a separate organisation and is not part of this service.