Lasting respects
Internet sites memorialize the departed
By CHRIS STURGIS
Staff writer
Times Union at Albany, NY
Don Cazer was driving past a cemetery when he had a disturbing thought: “Who will visit my grave?” he wondered. Cazer, 58, a Scotia resident who retired as a General Electric engineer, has grown children living in Paris, Massachusetts and Rochester. He wondered how their mobile, technology-oriented generation would pay its respects to the dead?
Cazer decided the World Wide Web wasn’t only for the living. The pages of the Web — where a click of the mouse can take you from an online order form to some total stranger’s body of research on a rock singer — could be used to memorialize the dead.
So, he set up Perpetual Life Memorials, available by computer around the clock and around the world. He charges $245 to post one photograph and one or two pages of text on the Internet forever, or as long as the Internet exists.
For Cazer, permanence is essential. “When they put a granite headstone on a grave, they expect it to be there for hundreds of years,” he said.
Perpetual Life Memorials isn’t the only site where a family member may be interred on the Internet.
Garden of Remembrance has “commemorative home pages” combining text, graphics, sound and video. There’s also Dearly Departed, In Memory Of, Memories Forever Ours, Virtual Heaven, Virtual Memorial Garden, Web Memorial, World Wide Cemetery and Eternal Monuments, which bills itself as “Your loved one’s final resting place in Cyberspace.”
Most of these give “visitors” a chance to sign a guest book or click their mouse and “leave flowers.” Some mention the value of the pages as the beginning of a family tree. Prices to post a message range from nothing up to $245.
Accessing a picture of a cemetery on a computer and making your way among the graves with a click of the mouse is quite consistent with the customs surrounding death, according to two academic researchers.
George Bonanno, an assistant professor of psychology at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., said a resting place in cyberspace gives the dead a magical way to live on, which is common in some non-Western cultures.
“You can have access to the person in an almost fantasy way,” he said. “The Internet has this mystery because we can be connected with people instantly and all over the world, and yet we can’t quite get there.”
He said assembling the elements of the page, such as a photograph or tributes written by family members, would be therapeutic to some in coping with their grief. His research shows that some people need to grieve actively, while others don’t.
“If somebody wants to call this thing up a lot, they can do that,” Bonanno said. “And if they don’t want to, they don’t have to see it.”
Internet memorials are inevitable, since art and technology have always been used to memorialize the dead, said Vanderlyn R. Pine, a professor of sociology at State University College at New Paltz.
“Golly, people are sending love letters on the Internet, sex messages on the Internet, financial messages on the Internet. Why not memorials?” said Pine, the author of eight books on death and the response to loss of loved ones.
“It seems like a natural extension of our technology, but I’m not sure the general public would see it that way.”
Changes in the way we memorialize the dead reflect changes in the way we live, he said. One 19th-century custom that might seem rather shocking to some modern people is the “death picture” — a photograph of the person in death, as shown in the book “Wisconsin Death Trip,” by Michael Lesy.
At that time, death had a much younger face, Pine said. “At that time it was common for people to take pictures of the dead, and the dead, to a great extent, were children,” he said. “They would then send the picture of the dead baby around to all the relatives and back to Europe or wherever the family had come from.”
Given the more distant relationship with death of the modern era, Cazer knows that marketing memorials is a delicate business. He has left brochures with funeral homes and sellers of gravestones, hoping they would reach the bereaved after they’ve had time to get accustomed to the loss.
“It may be good to approach clients who are pre-planning funerals because then they would get to write their own biographies,” Cazer said.
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