DenverPost.Com - Death has a new domain - 02/24/2007

[FemmeFatality]

Death has a new domain
Friends and kin grieve, share updates on Internet
By Melissa Harris
The Baltimore Sun
Denver Post
Article Last Updated: 02/24/2007 11:04:30 PM MST

Columbia, Md. - During Jay Koontz's final days, as a brain tumor slowed his breathing, his wife sat at his bedside and quietly read him notes that had been posted on his website.

She had established the site to provide updates on Jay's condition - having found the grind of e-mailing updates to family and friends overwhelming. She also provided a spot for people to leave words of encouragement.

"I tell him your messages and he squeezes my hand to let me know that he has heard," his wife, Mary Catherine Cochran, wrote on the site the day before he died.

The Internet has revolutionized the way we work, shop and fall in love, and now it is rapidly changing the way people prepare for and mourn death.

Websites such as Koontz's, which provide real-time health updates, have grown more common since a pioneering blog documented online the final days of counterculture guru Timothy Leary in 1996.

Sophisticated memorials, too, have popped up on the Web and now feature video montages, webcasts of funerals, and automated e-mail and audio messages prepared by the terminally ill for distribution after death.

Cyberspace is filled with so many deceased teenagers' MySpace.com pages that a young San Francisco entrepreneur catalogs them on mydeathspace.com. And The New York Times recently began posting video obituaries of luminaries online.

For some, memorial sites are a way to preserve a loved one's life story and social network in perpetuity. Others use them to address messages directly to the deceased.

"None of us want our kids to be forgotten, and that's the biggest thing," said Rose Palmer, 50, of Perry Hall, Md., whose son Bryan died in 2004 at age 12 of unknown causes. Doctors suspected heart arrhythmia.

She regularly writes to him on his memorial page on legacy.com. "It has been a blessing to write and read, to be reminded that he did exist, that he was here," she said.

Within two hours of Cochran's online announcement of her husband's death in January 2003 at age 45, condolences at rates of 10 or more a day arrived on the site's guestbook.

http://www.denverpost.com/headlines/ci_5299159

[death roe]

Now that was a good article. Rather than bashing this website, someone took the time to see what the world is doing with the www of virtual grieving of the dead. This is a whole new thing for all of us. People are going to come up with stuff even weirder that what we do here! Virtual funerals, births, weddings and autopsies Who knows what else may end up being the norm down the road.

[hunibuni]

"Cyberspace is filled with so many deceased teenagers' MySpace.com pages that a young San Francisco entrepreneur catalogs them on mydeathspace.com."

hmmmmmm an entrepreneur? they usually just say he's a vulture feeding on the carcasses of the dead..........

Go Mike!!!!!

I must find you to applaud.....