July 7, 2006

Website latest trend in creating a lasting memorial: You can even write your own before you go, and live on for generations

By Jane Glenn Haas

Since facing the side effects of widowhood -- like embalming versus cremation and burial versus scattering -- I've become more aware of the new way of death and dying.

   We don't, for example, view bodies as routinely as we used to when I grew up.

   The first body I remember was my great-grandfather, a man I never met alive and now mostly recall as being surrounded by candles.

   The "viewing" was an important social event in my youthful Irish neighbourhood. The quality of the coffin, the number of floral arrangements, the "natural appearance" of the corpse, the keening of family members were all part of a ritual that continued to the gravesite.

   That was before cremation, which is rapidly becoming the disposal method of choice.

   I had my mother cremated when she died in 1984. She was the first in her family to be cremated, which caused comment but fortunately had become church-sanctioned.

   I had Mom cremated because I had to transport her from California to New York. Mom always shuddered at the idea of bodies in cardboard boxes riding steerage in airplanes. A finely crafted bronze box suited her appreciation of quality.

   I had my husband Bob cremated because that was what he wanted.

   Bob also wanted his ashes scattered in places where he could "hear" classical music. And I'm not going to elaborate on how I achieved that.

   An even better approach was suggested by futurist Ken Dychtwald in the 1990s.
Instead of tombstones and cemeteries, build a web page with video streaming, photos, favourite recipes, music, other memories.

   Dychtwald, as usual, was ahead of his time.

   Do a Google search of memorial sites and you'll find several examples.

   "Well, it was a no-brainer," Dychtwald says. "Throughout history we have developed gravesites and tombs -- physical sites where we can pay our respects and remember.

   "But now everyone moves around a lot. We don't live where we grew up. The idea of a local cemetery doesn't function anymore for many of us."

   A website, on the other hand, is an egalitarian approach to memorializing a loved one. It can even be created by the person prior to death.

   "Family members can visit it for generations," he says. "It's alive, in a sense."

   Just log on to www.yourname.com and there you are -- talking to the future, savouring the present, living for every day over and over again.

   "Your philosophy of life will never die," Dychtwald predicts.

   I'm seriously thinking about this. A website that only shows my best side, of course. Pictures of me when I was skinny. Airbrushed photos of me after 50.
Clever quotations written just for the occasion.

   Who says death is "the last goodbye?"