The Love It Takes From Both Sides

People apologize to me for crying.

It happens on almost every call. We'll be twenty minutes into talking about their mother, or their husband, or the dog who slept on their feet for fourteen years, and their voice will break — and then they'll say I'm so sorry.

Sorry. For crying about someone they love.

I never know quite what to say in that moment except: please don't be. This is the part where it's supposed to hurt. You're not doing it wrong.

That's the thing nobody tells you about commissioning a memorial Love Chime. It isn't like buying a gift. It asks something of you. And I'd rather tell you that honestly, here, than have you find out halfway through a phone call with me.

It starts with a form. Or with me, on the phone.

The first step of every commission is a form we send you. It's designed to spark ideas — questions about the person, their colors, their sayings, the symbols that belonged to them.

Some people fill it out beautifully. They've been carrying these details for years and it comes pouring out onto the page.

And some people can't. Not won't — can't. Grief takes your capacity for paperwork before it takes anything else.

If that's you, I'll get on the phone instead. Honestly, that's my preference anyway. I'd rather hear the story than read it.

The hard part

Here's what I've learned watching people go through this.

To design something that captures a person, you have to go back and get them. All of them. What they stood for. What they said. What you miss. What you'd want a stranger walking past your yard to somehow know about them.

That's beautiful. It's also painful, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

You will remember things you haven't let yourself think about in months. You'll laugh at something they used to do and then get blindsided two seconds later. Designing a custom memorial brings up the entire spectrum — grief, joy, anger, gratitude, the ache, all of it, sometimes in the same sentence.

It is not a small thing to sit down and deliberately remember someone.

But here's the other half of that truth, and it's the half I've watched happen over and over: telling the story is part of the healing. People get off those calls lighter. Not because the grief left, but because somebody finally sat and listened to all of it.

There's no clever question. There's just listening.

People sometimes assume I have some technique — a magic question that gets people to open up about their loved one.

I don't. I've thought about it, and there isn't one.

What opens people is being heard. That's it. That's the whole thing. I think it's what most of us want from this world and almost never get — for someone to see you, hear you, hear your pain and your story and how genuinely wonderful this person was. Not to fix it. Not to move you along. Just to listen and understand.

So that's my job on those calls. I'm not extracting design requirements. I'm listening to someone talk about a person they love, and somewhere in that conversation, the design shows up on its own.

And then it turns

Once it's all out, I bring it to Crystal.

She isn't on those calls — I'm the one who takes them — but she hears every story from me, and she hears it as a designer. The colors. The symbol. The shape a person's life should take in wood and metal and resin.

Then we build it together. I don't do this alone, and I never have. Every Love Chime that leaves here was made by both of us.

We take the details — the colors, the symbol, the thing they always said, the part of their story that mattered most — and we turn it into a design. Then we send it to you.

That's the moment it changes.

I've watched it happen again and again. The grief that was sitting on that person's chest turns into something closer to pride. Because what they're looking at isn't our design. It's theirs. They chose every detail. They decided what the world should know about this person. We just gave it a shape.

They made it. They just didn't know they could until they saw it.

What "designed around your story" actually looks like

There's one piece I still think about.

The man we made it for loved the universe. So his small part of his ashes went into a custom epoxy striker made to look like a galaxy — the whole cosmos, in a four-inch disc, hanging at the center of the chime.

And when I finished it, I had this overwhelming feeling that his soul was in the universe now. Forever. Spreading love out into the world every time the wind moved that chime.

That's what we mean when we say designed around your story. Not a name engraved on something generic. The actual thing they loved, made into the actual piece that makes the sound.

Our side of it

I've told you what it asks of you. Here's what it asks of us.

Before I work with anyone's ashes, I stop and say a little prayer. I give thanks for the opportunity — that a family trusted us with what remains of someone they love, and that we get to honor their life and give them a way to keep spreading love into the world.

I tear up every time. I've never once gotten used to it, and I hope I never do.

That's the part I want you to know if you're nervous about mailing us something irreplaceable. We're not processing material. We work with one person's ashes at a time — never two, never batched — and whatever we don't use comes home to you with your chime. But before any of that, there's a prayer. Because that's who is in our studio, and we know it.

What it costs

I'll be honest about this part too, since I'm being honest about everything else.

Building Love Chimes has taken our nights and our weekends and a fair amount of our sanity. We both have full-time jobs. We both have families. Starting something from nothing while carrying all of that is not for the faint of heart — it's for the stubborn, and there have been plenty of tears on the way here.

There is no pretty version of building a business. It's hard. It has taken a lot of apologies, a lot of learning, and a lot of wasting time and money before figuring out how it should have been done.

But when it's your passion, you just keep taking the next step.

And then I get on the phone with someone whose mother died in March, and I listen for an hour, and three weeks later Crystal and I hang her mother's chime in the wind and hear it sing — and there is no version of my life where I'd rather have spent that Saturday.

That's why we built this.

When it arrives

We ship every Love Chime in a black box with a purple ribbon and our wax seal.

The first thing most people say is that the packaging is beautiful. The second thing they say is that they didn't realize how big it was.

You can't tell from photographs. It's 36 inches tall and seven pounds and it is a serious, substantial piece of art, and that only becomes real when the box opens and you're holding it and you can see every detail that went into it — the hand-painted work, the engraving, the five frequencies, the striker holding the person you love.

Not many gifts give you that feeling.

That's not an accident. It's the hours. It's the listening. It's the prayer. It's everything both of us put in, from both sides, sitting in your hands at the same time.

Whenever you're ready

If you're reading this and you've been sitting on the idea because you know it's going to hurt to go through it — I understand, and there's no clock on it.

Nothing is due today. You don't have to be ready. You can send us a text with nothing in it but a name, and we'll be here whenever you want to talk, and if that's in three weeks or next spring, that's fine.

We'll listen when you're ready.

And when you are, what comes out of it won't be a thing that reminds you they're gone. It'll be their love, out in the wind, still moving through the world exactly like they always did.

Whispers of love in every breeze.

Our frequency language is symbolic and Solfeggio-inspired. We precision cut our aluminum tubes using frequency calculations and measure them to come as close as possible to the intended tones. We do not tune the tubes after cutting, and we do not claim that each finished Love Chime produces exact frequencies. The 528 Hz-inspired Love Frequency is part of the meaning, intention and emotional story behind each piece.

Ready to Create a Love Chime?

Every Love Chime is a one-of-a-kind commissioned heirloom, handcrafted in DFW, Texas, and designed around your story — custom colors, meaningful symbols, hand-painted artwork, and the option to include a small part of a loved one's remains.

Commissioned pieces begin at $444.44. Most are finished within 3 to 4 weeks after design approval.

Explore: Memorial · Pet Memorial · Wedding · Anniversary · Sacred Milestones

See our work: Browse the Love Chimes gallery

Start a conversation — nothing is due today: Text Us: 817-318-8988 · Call Us: 817-318-8988 · Email Us: hello@love-chimes.com

Or tell us who you're honoring — six questions, thirty seconds. Breck or Crystal will reply personally, usually the same day.