Is there anything you feel too uncomfortable to say now to a loved one, friend, neighbor or co-worker that you want them to hear from you after you’re dead and buried?
Well there is a new online service that will help you deliver that message from the grave. For a price, of course, it will send your parting thoughts and goodbyes to anyone you want, anywhere in the world. This cyber service is aptly titled, thelastemail.com.
“Some people say we’re trying to make money out of death, but it’s not like that,” Alberto Iriarte, director of Global Spectrum, the company that runs thelastemail.com told the Associated Press during a telephone interview from the company’s office in Brazil. “We see it as trying to help people get over the grief.
“We’re getting some 200 hits a day, of which an average of two become clients. People find computers more intimate and private than letters and they feel freer to say things this way,” Iriarte said.
Even so, it doesn’t appear that these e-mails from the grave will help close the digital divide that has blacks lagging behind whites when it comes to Internet usage.
“If I want my children to know something, I’m going to see to it that they know it,” Clarence B. Wright, owner of a funeral home in Irvington, N.J. told BlackAmericaWeb.com. “I’m not going to put it on a Web site for somebody else to read.”
Thelastemail.com claims that powerful encryption technology and a personal password, which only the client and not even the Web site provider can access, will guarantee the strictest privacy.
But even with such assurances, Wright is leery: “I’d be very careful about how I put messages to my daughter or my son or whatever. I’d have a problem with that and I’d look that over and think about it. I wouldn’t jump into that without really understanding what I’m doing.”
“The idea that people want to resolve issues and say things that should be said before they die…that’s universal,” said Spencer Levine, a spokesman for the largest grief and loss counseling service in the Washington, D.C. region. “I’m not sure e-mail is necessarily the medium in which that should happen.”
Thelastemail.com allows clients to send one e-mail for free once their designated trustee certifies to the company that they have died. They can send more messages, including video, photo or audio attachments, as long as they pay a monthly fee before they die that could range between $11 to $240.
“There seems something, somewhat, unsavory about having this on a dot.com site which suggests that someone’s profiting from this,” said Levine. His Capital Hospice has counseled more than 35,000 patients and families since 1977.
“It’s a modern version of that drawer or box where we have always left our letters,” said Iriarte, whose company offers its e-mail service in English, Spanish and Portuguese.
Wright, a funeral director for 53 years, is not so sure that blacks will rush to buy such a service. “Our community is not so well-versed that they’re using the computer to send messages out to their loved ones about what they want done and how they want it done. Usually, it’s done with the funeral home, maybe with the pastor of their church, and some members of the family will discuss it. And it’s usually on paper. And we encourage it because it makes a whole lot of sense.”
But Kelda Morris, a black woman in Reston, Va., disagrees. She lost her husband Carl suddenly in August. Now she monitored his e-mail account after his death because friends continued to send messages, unaware that the former executive director of the National Association of Black Journalists is dead. Morris says she would have welcomed a final e-mail from her late husband, to help soothe her grief.
“That’s the way the world is moving — cyberspace.” She said. “I think that it would be a good idea.”
