Today would have been my friend Jeremy Kitchen’s 43rd birthday. He died back in March, due to complications from colon cancer. Kitchen was my best friend. Even when he was on the other side of the world, we texted each other almost every day. He was my emotional sounding board. My rubber duck. My rotten soldier.
A short while after Kitchen’s passing, someone else got control of his phone number. Just like that, I couldn’t text him anymore. Losing that connection I’d had for almost two decades was terrible. I started putting the things I wished I could tell him into my notes app, but it wasn’t the same.
So, after getting multiple alerts that today was his birthday — thanks, Apple — I decided to work through my sadness and make a simple messaging app called disparu.
disparu does one thing: it gives you a private place to send messages to someone that you’ve lost. There’s no chatbot trying to mimic anyone. No AI bullshit faking its way through processing your feelings. You message and nothing responds.
Kitchen would’ve hated it if something responded.
BTW: The name disparu is French for “missing person”, which seemed pretty appropriate to me.
Grief gets weird. Some days you want to tell the person you’ve lost about your day. Or you want to have a laugh about an inside joke the two of you have. Texting an old phone number might feel slightly less strange than talking into a void — but if you really think about it, it’s actually kind of the same thing.
Because it’s a Progressive Web App, disparu doesn’t require an internet connection. As soon as you’ve installed it to your home screen on your phone, you can use it wherever and whenever you’d like.
Everything that happens in the app is stored on your device. The messages don’t go anywhere. It’s a space for you.
I’ve made it so there’s a user configurable message limit of between 10 to 50. Once you send more messages than the set limit — the default is 10 — the old messages will auto-delete.
After all, can what you’re talking into really be called a void if everything you’ve ever said hangs around forever and ever?
To keep things from getting too awkward, I also made it so you can configure the name and picture of the person you’re sending messages to.
The whole thing was built quickly over a single afternoon. That means disparu isn’t perfect. But it’s not supposed to be. It’s just something that I made because I needed it. Maybe there’s a chance that you need it too.
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