I’m Zena Carina. I create personal songs for families who want to remember someone they love in a way that feels intimate, beautiful and true.
A personal song doesn’t simply tell someone’s story. It becomes part of the way they’re remembered.
I created A Song for Life because I wanted families to have something they could return to — not just in the first days of grief, but years later, when they simply want to feel close again.
A Song for Life began long before I knew I was creating it.
I grew up in a mixed English and Jamaican family where music was woven into everyday life.
My father, known locally as King Bob, was part of London’s Blue Beat and basement-party scene in the 1960s. At home there was reggae, classical music, gospel, folk and a double-keyboard Hammond-style organ that I spent hours exploring.
I learned classical piano as a child but was always wandering away from the page and making up songs of my own. Over the years, reggae, soul, folk, salsa and music from many different cultures continued to shape the way I hear melody and storytelling.
Later, I became a Registered Nurse and specialised in Critical Care.
I loved the science, and the satisfaction of nursing someone back to health. But the deepest lessons were always human. Sometimes treatment would come to an end, and there was nothing more medicine could do. What remained was love, family, dignity, kindness and the memories of the person at the centre of it all.
I also saw how music could bring comfort when words were difficult to find — for patients and for the people beside them.
When my own father was dying, we did what our family had always done: we played music.
The night before he died, a palliative care nurse gently asked whether he understood what was happening to him. Bob Marley was playing quietly beside his bed. He paused for a moment and said:
“Honestly, people tend to frighten themselves. I think music is good for you — it makes you feel better.”
He died peacefully the following day. I have never forgotten those words or the calm with which he spoke them. Looking back, I realise that moment brought together the things that had shaped my life all along: music, memory and care.
That is the heart of A Song for Life.
The details you share help me find the feeling, character and musical direction that belong to them.
Not just dates and facts, but the stories, sayings, relationships, quirks and memories that made them unmistakably themselves.
I write the lyrics to feel natural, personal and singable, without becoming too heavy or sentimental.
Gentle, soulful, joyful, acoustic, gospel-inspired, reggae, folk or something else entirely — the music should feel right for the life being remembered.
Whether their life was quiet, colourful, funny, faithful, musical, complicated or full of ordinary beauty, there is a song that can honour them.