Obit Research

In honor of Halloween, I would like to bring you a truly morbid post by pointing out two interesting trends in the realm of death this week.

First, TIME Magazine had an article this week, “What Happens to Your Facebook Profile After You Die”. Apparently if a user dies and the family can submit proof like an obituary, the profile can either be removed completely or converted into a memorial. The user then won’t show up in Facebook’s suggestions, and information like status updates won’t show up in Facebook’s news feed. This came out of complaints by users who were getting suggestions to reconnect with deceased users.

I think this whole notion of what we do with deceased people in the virtual, social world is really interesting, and you might also want to check out an older TIME article on How to Manage Your Online Life When You’re Dead. In developing ideas for our project, we’ve been grappling with the notion of a similar memorial-like page to be offered by Legacy.com. We’ll have to come up with a sensitive proposal for this idea but it’s an idea that cannot be ignored given such clear online trends in that direction.

The second trend I came across occurs has to do with how we deal with our dead in real-life. For a couple of years I lived across the street from a cemetery. I’ve often wondered — don’t ask me why — if cemeteries ever run out of space. Well apparently they do. The City of London cemetery is running out of space and has found an unusual solution by offering families to reuse old graves for their loved-one.  Think about it. Would you be willing to put your loved one in a stranger’s grave? Or better yet, would you be OK with a stranger being buried in your grave 75 years after you were buried in the same spot? Pretty disturbing to think about isn’t it? But this is a real solution to a very real problem.

One cemetery has already been forced into this practice out of sustainability issues, so this most likely will be a problem for many others sooner or later. I’ve always wondered why people insist on burying loved ones when cremation is so much cleaner, so much cheaper and we don’t have to allot whole plots of land to death. One reason, I think, is a religious one. Judaism, my religion, forbids cremation all together. Sooner or later, however, as the world gets more crowded, so will the number of the dead, and we may be forced to reevaluate and change all the ways we currently deal with our dead.

Happy Halloween everyone!