HAMBURG (dpa) – Modern technology has given the bereaved a new way to remember the dead. Today, anyone can erect a virtual gravestone online for the deceased, and anyone worldwide can visit.
But in a time when thoughts of death and dying are anathema to many, experts are asking how virtual memorials are helping the living in ways that traditional memorials are not.
Since the first virtual graveyard was set up in the mid-1990s, their number has grown to around 100. The total number of “visitors” to virtual graveyards is unknown, but in all likelihood has reached at least a few hundred thousand.
Each electronic graveyard is essentially a large database containing anywhere from a few to several thousand obituaries – sometimes with fancy graphics, photos of the deceased, and even virtual “tombstones.”
Virtual graveyards, like real graveyards, one could argue, provide solace to the living, a place to grieve and remember the deceased.
After 22-year-old Andrew Kevan Shreeves committed suicide, his sister lamented at a virtual graveyard: “I do not know why you committed suicide, Andrew, you took the answer to that question to the grave. I wish I could turn back the clock and change things but I can’t.”
Patrick McNeil Gentry, who at 32 left behind a wife and two children, is remembered on another memorial page by a former companion: “I loved him very much, enough to set him free and always hope he’d come back to me.
“Some day, I know we will be together again. Until that time, let this memorial stand for my undying love for Patrick McNeil Gentry.”
These examples are cited by folklorist Gudrun Schwibbe of Germany’s University of Goettingen, who along with her colleague Ira Spieker has investigated the socio-cultural aspect of this new form of remembrance of the dead. The examples, say the folklorists, show clearly how these new structures for remembrance cross beyond the traditional possibilities of speaking publicly about the dead.
In these two cases, they offer a forum for eulogizing which finds no place in traditional obituaries or at the funeral and burial.
Yet the memorials appear to serve not just as a space for self- representation and self-reflection. They also fulfil some need for consolation which cannot be met in those other, narrower ceremonies, say the researchers.
One touching virtual grave, constructed by a mother for her deceased 11-year-old daughter, depicts in music and pictures the life and the sickness of little Carol, including a view into her family life and even her circle of friends.
Visitors to the online memorial can leave thoughts and impressions in a “guest book.” One can also follow a link to the mother’s home page, where a continuously updated diary takes the reader through her struggle to cope with the loss.
Sometimes criticisms of the deceased which would normally not be spoken aloud appear in the memorials, notes Professor Schwibbe.
In other cases, friends drop references to details which the family would most likely normally keep quiet, such as the killer disease AIDS as the cause of death. Nevertheless, Schwibbe finds almost no examples of ironic, denigrating, or uniformly negative eulogies at online graveyards.
In cyberspace, places such as these can also become the object of voyeuristic fascination. Yet they also provide visitors with an opportunity to get away from the forced social relationships that are bound up with mourning. The medium lends itself to an abstract, distanced pseudo-community.
Asked about this trend, one pastor of a large, urban graveyard indicated that the movement can influence and transmit something completely different from the existing institutions set up to assist the bereaved.
“(Online graveyards) are helpful to humanity,” said Pastor Hans- Christian Weppler of Hamburg, Germany.
Over the course of his duties at funerals and burials, Weppler has observed that many attendees cannot find the right frame of mind or an appropriate reaction in the face of death. He sees in the new medium a “chance for the individual.”
Perhaps for many people the cyberspace memorials are connected to a new understand of eternity and the afterlife. They tie into the existing traditional conception that some essential part of the deceased is carried on in a different form or in another place such as heaven, Schwibbe feels.
In the end they operate on two levels with the concept of transcendence: “Even in these virtual graveyards one sees manifestations of the ambivalence of the consciousness towards mortality and immortality that are so typical of the western world,” Weppler says.
