Corona Daily 301: Death & Co.

Several young start-ups providing end-of-life services have prospered during the pandemic.

Our own mortality is a difficult and unpleasant concept. Indian mythology mentions seven immortal men, but I have never met any of them nor could I find their whereabouts in the internet. One can understand children and youngsters not believing they would die. But people in their 70s and 80s also struggle to visualize a world without them. I read about a woman, who finally, on her 90^th birthday decided to end each of her phone call with ‘I love you.’ She maintained that phrase until she eventually died at 98.

Sex and Death have historically been top taboo topics. Now sex education is given to school children, but talking about death is still in bad taste. Buddhist monks are given pictures of decaying corpses so they understand the inevitable final fate. Yoga practitioners end the session with a ‘corpse pose’, the most relaxing asana. (One is expected to lie like a corpse, with a blank mind. In most cases, that is when thousands of thoughts come flooding in).

Thankfully, the pandemic is raising awareness among people of all nations and nationalities that they may actually die one day. In modern times, you must decide what is going to be your final tweet. Should your FB wall disappear, or be memorialized with a dove on it? (Otherwise, you will keep getting happy birthdays for years after you are gone). What happens to your email correspondence? We struggle to remember the passwords when we are alive, it is an unspeakable burden on our survivors to open our emails or bank websites after we are gone.

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Cake offers a free service to catalogue a user’s end-of-life wishes. Burial or cremation? Ashes to be scattered or composted into tree food or immersed into an ocean? What sort of music would you like to be played at the funeral? In the last six months, Cake has started receiving emails from young people. Between February and June, Cake received five times the number of sign-ups. Cake software allows you to design your tombstone. Cake has signed up with 51 hospitals and 1000 clinics. Cake’s “trusted decision maker” form, a document giving the instructions in case a person becomes a vegetable, can now be submitted without a notary.

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Eterneva specializes in turning a person’s ashes into diamonds. The company sends you a special pack in which you post two tablespoons or half a cup of ashes of your loved one and $3000. In seven to ten months, you get the diamond ring, an eternal presence of the departed around your finger. Eterneva offers a wide and luxurious choice, the 3 carat Blue Diamond costing $50000. This service is offered for pets as well, because pets is a faster moving business.

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Lantern provides its patented grief and condolence content that includes a ‘pandemic-proof’ guide to ‘inclusively address grief at work’.

Lifeweb360 allows you to collect memories of the loved ones to celebrate the life of the departed.

Going with grace is formed by five black women entrepreneurs. It primarily advices on a good death in a racist society. (meaning how to avoid a white policeman pressing his knee on your neck, or storming your house and emptying his gun into you).

Some offer exciting games such as “write your own obituary”. Apparently, this is an exercise at the Stanford business school. The platform includes templates and help to write and publish your top-class obituary, posthumously.

In this booming time, all these start-ups have come together to form a sort of consortium. It is called the “Death & Co.”

Ravi