Nobody should tell you what you are feeling

A grieving buyer should never be told what they are feeling. The words used internally to sort one kind of memory from another are not words that should ever reach the person who is living it.

This is a rule about our language rather than yours. You describe your own memory however you like.

Why it matters more here than anywhere

Every category of gift has house vocabulary — words that make sense to the people building the thing and sound presumptuous to the person buying it. Most of the time the cost is mild embarrassment.

For somebody ordering two days after a house sale completed, or the month after a funeral, being handed a label for their own experience is not mild. It is the product telling them what this is, at exactly the moment they have not decided.

What that rules out

Categories announced back at you. Sympathy phrased as expertise. Any sentence beginning we know how hard this must be, which is a claim nobody making a printed object is in a position to make.

Also: the vocabulary of the trade. Internal names for kinds of memory, process words, anything that reveals a memory was filed under a heading before it was made.

What is left

Their words, and the facts. A photograph, a date, and whatever the family actually wrote — in the register they wrote it in, not recast into something more appropriate.

If somebody writes four flat sentences about a kitchen, four flat sentences about a kitchen is the correct output. Warming that up is the failure this rule prevents.

The same rule applies to the good occasions

It is easier to see the harm in a memorial, and the rule is not limited to one. A seventieth birthday piece that announces it is a celebration of a wonderful life has done the same thing in a cheerier register — decided on the buyer's behalf what the day meant, before they said.

The eightieth that somebody organised because their grandmother is unwell and this may be the last one everybody makes it to is not, from the inside, a celebration. Nothing about the process needs to know which it is.

And if you want to say nothing

That is a complete answer. A photograph and a date is enough, and a piece with no text is not an unfinished piece.

The related rule — that the handling has to match the memory even when nothing is said — is in a piece bought in grief should not read as a celebration. The practical side is in how to commemorate someone who has died.