August 18, 1997
TAKING IN THE SITES / By SARAH WYATT
Mourning the Dead in Cyberspace
Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company
After the death of her 25-year-old son, William, Mary Withers found that friends had a limited store of patience for her grief; they soon began urging her to pull herself together and move on. When support groups and counselors also failed to provide the kind of outlet she needed, Ms. Withers turned to the Internet.
It seems an impersonal place to seek solace from grief, but for those who have recently lost a loved one, the Internet can be less daunting than the world of faces and voices. There are dozens of sites on the Internet dedicated to dealing with death -- from virtual memorials to news groups. Taken as a whole, these have formed an extensive support network for grieving relatives and friends.
Psychotherapist Tom Golden's World Wide Web-based Grief and Healing Discussion Page is a haven for many people.
"When I found the discussion group it was like 'Oh, thank God,' " said Ms. Withers, a software engineer in Los Angeles. "We don't live in a society that encourages you to talk about it face to face, so the slight indirectness, the slight facelessness makes it easier to talk about your grief. People bare the darkest, scariest parts of their soul there."
Last month one woman quoted a line from a Dallas chorale on the Grief and Healing Discussion Page: "I'm past the point of going quietly insane. I'm getting quite noisy about it. The neighbors must think I'm mad. The neighbors, for once, think right."
Another woman responded: "You will get through this first rotten year. You pick up the pieces slowly, but you mend, at least enough to survive."
Lyn Bonde, a grief counselor at the St. Francis Center in Washington, D.C., said, "Every person's experience is unique to them, but in the broader world of the Internet, there are always people who can say, 'I know how you feel.'
"At least this creates an opportunity for some kind of contact," she added.
Internet discussions also offer an anonymous forum, where people can escape the fear that they will be judged for what they are feeling or for how long they have been grieving. "You see people come in there basically dragging their brains behind them and they post some semiconscious thoughts that are just dripping with grief, and in a week they're helping other people," Ms. Withers said. "You get to help people instantly."
Not everyone is prepared to bare their souls on the Internet, however. Online memorials or obituaries give people a chance to pay tribute to their loved ones in cyberspace without being explicit about their own feelings.
On Web sites like Dearly Departed, Eternal Monuments in Cyberspace, Virtual Memorials and Virtual Heaven, people can submit obituaries, elegies, poems or a few words in memory of someone they loved who died.
Some of the services are free, while others charge a fee for the labor of setting up a Web page. Many memorial home pages combine text, multimedia and data-base technologies.
But grieving on the Web is not all about sharing and supporting and patience. In the tradition of the funeral industry as described in Jessica Mitford's 1963 book "The American Way of Death," some of the sites are about serious profits too.
The most expensive service is Perpetual Memorials, where the price of an all-inclusive memorial package is $995. This includes a family tree, video and audio clips, and interactive tributes. Most services are much less expensive, costing an average of $50, and include pictures and text.
At World Gardens' Virtual Cemetery and the World Wide Cemetery, browsers can wander through the site and leave virtual floral arrangements at the "grave sites" of anyone memorialized there. The floral arrangements are electronic messages sent to the family or friend who arranged for the grave site.
Online memorials last indefinitely, unless there is a designated time period set by the fee schedule. In any case, the pages still last longer than most obituaries.
John Yarbrough of Austin, Texas, said the memorial Web page he created for his friend Tom Churchill would last only as long as his account with The Eden Matrix lasts. Yarbrough said he already had the Web page and thought it was a good vehicle for memorializing his friend, who was hit by a car and killed in 1996. He was 28. Relatives who had been out of touch with Churchill still visit the Web page, Yarbrough said.
A company called Simplex Knowledge, of White Plains, N.Y., is taking online memorials one step further: cyberfunerals. There have been no such funerals yet, but soon people will be able to watch the funerals of friends or family on the Internet if given a special code, said Jerry Fischoff, director of operations for Simplex.
A system for such services will cost funeral homes about $7,500, and they will probably in turn charge family members several hundred dollars.
"Cybermourn," as the company is calling it, captures a funeral live with portable remote cameras. The still images are refreshed every 30 seconds.
When asked about the trend, Lisa Carlson, executive director of the Funeral and Memorial Societies of America and currently the industry's most vocal critic, voiced no ethical concerns with Cybermourn, comparing it instead with consumers' short-lived fascination with drive-by viewings.
"I think usually people go to a funeral to show support to family members or show respect for the deceased, and just peeking at a casket or checking out who's at the funeral on the Internet probably is not compelling," she said. "There will be people who will spend the extra $200 because they want to have whatever is new, but as a long-term trend I doubt it will survive."
Fischoff agreed that the idea of cyberfunerals seems a bit macabre or tasteless to some people. "This is kind of a love-hate thing. Some people can't believe you could do that, and others think it's a good idea," he said. "This is a way of bringing people together."
TAKING IN THE SITES is published weekly, on Mondays. Click here for a list of links to other columns in the series.
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