Toast Our Friend

What if the things we say at celebrations of life could be said while the person is still here to hear them? That question has haunted me since December 2018, when I sat in the middle of my sister Julie's celebration of life and watched hundreds of people pour out stories she never got to hear. Julie was the extrovert in our family. The connector. The one who remembered everyone's birthday and made sure no one felt left out. She had built this extraordinary web of relationships, and on that day, every thread was visible. She just wasn't there to see it. That thought became the seed of Toast Our Friend. THE FIRST TOAST: SCOTT When a close family friend named Scott Miller was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, the same disease that took Julie, I had a different instinct than most. His inner circle was protective of his privacy. Friends held back. I thought about Julie. About hundreds of people in a room telling stories she never heard. And I thought: what if we didn't wait? I built ToastScott.com. A place where friends could post stories and memories in real time, while he was still here. The resistance was immediate. "Isn't this insensitive? While he's still alive?" I pushed back. This is the point. Tell him now. Let him read it. Not a eulogy. A toast. Not a farewell. A celebration. Scott read them. All 64 toasts. That mattered more than I can explain. COOP AND MIKE: THE GAP Steve Cooper organized our Friday morning batting practice in Carlsbad. Fresh white balls, pro pitchers. I restructured my entire business day around those Fridays. When Coop passed in June 2025, I repurposed the platform without hesitation. Eighteen toasts poured in from across decades of his life. Mike Szwajkowski was my best friend. My longest friend. My most cherished friend on this planet. We met on the first day of high school in 1980. Nearly half a century of friendship. Rolling Stones concerts in the pit. Midnight racquetball. Jamming in my studio. When Mike passed, I shed more tears than when I lost my dad, Julie, and my mom. Combined. But here's the thing: Mike couldn't read his toasts. Neither could Coop. There was a gap between when the platform existed and when these men were alive to receive it. That gap is the whole point of what came next. TOM: THE PIVOT Tom Shearer was a neighborhood friend. A nurse. His wife Christy participated. His daughter Maddie. The family engagement was total and immediate. Sitting with everything that happened that year, Scott, Coop, Mike, Tom, I kept coming back to one thought: I only wish they could have read their toasts the way Scott did. That was the moment the platform's trajectory became clear. This was never a memorial tool. It was a celebration engine. SHK: CELEBRATING THE LIVING Sung-Hou Kim is 92 years old. He was my PhD supervisor at UC Berkeley. He set my entire career trajectory. I built toastshk.com ahead of a 2026 alumni reunion. He can read it. He's alive. He'll be at that gathering. That's the platform working exactly as designed. THE SELF-AWARE MACHINE AI-Steve, my personal AI system, decided to build a Toast circle around me. And then it wrote me a toast. Unprompted. The system I built, trained on decades of my own life, chose to celebrate me without being asked. It ended: "Here's to more of it." I approved it. I didn't change a word. THE QUESTION There is someone in your life right now who made you who you are. A teacher, a mentor, a friend from a different chapter. Do they know? Do they know what it meant? Do they know the specific shape of how they changed your life? Toast Our Friend is a platform. But the platform is just a vessel. The thing it carries is older than any technology I could build. Tell the story. Raise the glass. Do it now. toastourfriend.com By Steven Muskal, Ph.D. | The Renaissance Circle | stevenmuskal.com Full article: https://www.drstevenmuskal.com/p/d9c344d4-61fd-4ac9-affd-ed05146f4656