What prompted me to the story was recalling various news reports of people attaching photographs and audio and video tape players to their gravestones. Hmm, I said to myself, if this goes on.... If Hans Moravec et al. are right and we become able to download human minds into computers.... If the computers are small enough.... Then someday people will surely....

And just the other day, a friend sent me a URL that popped up on my screen a pitch for an outfit that installs "View-Logy" electronic display units in gravestones. The idea is to let folks record up to 250 screens of pictures, text, genealogical data, etc. Waterproof, powered by batteries or solar cells, guaranteed, priced at about five grand. It isn't quite what I put in my story, but it is certainly a step in that direction. "If this goes on..." is going on. Take a look, and tell me what you think.

Meanwhile, I'm going to tell you about some of the other stuff I've found on the 'Net that has to do with funerals and digital memorials.

First, there are a number of sites that are quite traditional in their content. The "Death, Afterlife and Eschatology" page is full of links to material on the world's myths, legends, rituals, and more concerning death. See also the "Death" page. If you want to know about the symbolism of death--anchors, broken columns and flowers, hands, weeping willows--click here. The Tombstone Traveller's Guide "is intended to take you on an intellectual, spiritual and fun journey ... exploring cemeteries in your own locale and around the world," complete with photos. The Association for Gravestone Studies, "founded in 1977 for the purpose of furthering the study and preservation of gravestones [, has] an interest in gravemarkers of all periods [and] promotes the study of gravestones from historical and artistic perspectives, expands public awareness of the significance of historic gravemarkers, and encourages individuals and groups to record and preserve gravestones."

So far this is all very interesting and useful, and surely of immense help to anyone researching a term paper on death and dying (The Tombstone Traveller's Guide has a link for the sociology of death and dying, as well as others). For a somewhat more essential connection to the Internet, visit New South Wales, Australia, where you will find an offer to "display the family grave at this site. It can then be accessed anywhere from around the world. We will update the image every 12 months so you can see if any maintenance needs to be attended to."

You have to be buried in Australia to take advantage of this particular deal, but you can be buried anywhere and still use the wide array of "virtual cemeteries" showing up in cyberspace. There are Angels Online, Virtual Heaven, which refers to "those dearly departed who now exist solely within these uncharted realms of Cyberspace"), and more. And you don't have to worry about mowing the grass, raking leaves, undoing vandalism, or cleaning up piles of dead flowers with any of them.

There are even virtual cemeteries for pets. The Virtual Pet Cemetery claims to be "the world's best known and most cherished online burial ground. Thousands of visitors from all over the world come to the cemetery every day to read and share the epitaphs."

In 1996, Sharon Mnich set up the non-profit Virtual Memorials as a way to remember her grandparents. By July 1997, she had designed over 200 memorials for others. These Web pages include a biography of the deceased, photos, poems or tributes, and guest books. They offer the same advantage as the simple Australian grave photo--instant access from anywhere via the 'Net--plus a much wider array of memorial material, much as with the View-Logy units. In addition, they draw consolations via e-mail. Mourners hear from long-lost relatives, old friends of the deceased, and utter strangers who share names, hobbies, interests, expressions of sympathy, and inspirational stories. "It helps so much to know we're not alone," said one of Mnich's clients, who had memorialized her 17-year-old son.

The World Wide Cemetery looks pretty non-profit too. It charges $10 for text-only memorials and $15 for ones with graphics. It advertises that its monuments "allow people to share the lives of their loved ones in ways that traditional printed death announcements or stone inscriptions cannot. Photographs, moving images and even sounds can be included with a monument. People can create hypertext links among family members, and in doing so forge a genealogy of Internet users and their families online and in real time."

Unfortunately, the low-cost and/or non-profit approach could hardly last. The Virtual Cemeteries site, affiliated with the Armstrong Funeral Home of Port Colborne, Ontario, charges $25 US for text-only memorials and $50 for all others; it seems fairly well populated. World Gardens charges $35 "to celebrate the life and accomplishments of those we love... to tell the World about them and what they meant to us." The Virtual Memorial Company of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, offers five-page memorials for $50, to be displayed in any of a long list of ethnic, military, religious, occupational, and national virtual cemeteries, most of which seem to have very few occupants. Final Regards charges $30 for text-only memorials and $50 for memorials with three photos, per six months.

By August 1997, British Methodist preacher David Wilkinson was charging 150 pounds ($238) to put an obituary, a photo, and a copy of the death certificate on a Web page, saying, "We are seeking to bring back the dignity to funerals."

Funerals-OnLine "is intended to assist those faced with the helpless feeling of grief." It offers a memorial garden and peddles angel jewelry and books on how to write a eulogy, among other things.

Money, money, money. It's necessary--someone has to pay the electric company and the access provider that hosts the Web pages--and I suppose it's inevitable that as on-line mourning becomes more popular, the price rises and someone opens a gift shop. It stops being a cute hobby thing and becomes affiliated with funeral homes. The next step will surely be affiliation with funeral-home chains. Or perhaps local Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will decide that the 'Net's famed sense of community defines each ISP as a cyberspace village, and since every village has to have a cemetery, every ISP will have to have its very own virtual cemetery. Perhaps other "community centers" on the 'Net will do likewise; the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America already maintains an obituary page for late members. Perhaps on-line magazines such as Tomorrowsf could do the same (Think of it! If you let your subscription lapse, we send out Tony and then post your name in the cemetery).

Is this all just another fly-by-night, flash-in-the-pan, Internet scam? Or is there really something to be gained by doing our mourning on-line?

There is the appeal of not having to mow the grass. You don't have to stand in the rain to meditate upon the dead. You don't have to travel to visit the grave. The mention of genealogy above may be particularly interesting to those of you who (like me) share that hobby. It can be frustrating to stare at an entry in a record book, or at a tombstone in the Shady Rest Home for the Breathing Impaired, and know that the name and the dates of birth and death are all you will ever know. Both View-Logy units and the virtual approach hold out the promise of making the genealogist's researches much easier.

But there appear to be some very emotional, spiritual advantages as well. Writing in the June 1996 Macworld about the email messages that came in after the death of a friend, Ian Brown said, "messages about my late friend kept his spirit alive more vividly and more steadily than I'd experienced after the death of anyone else. Other times when friends died, I remembered them when I could. But in cyberspace, Yuri has never ceased to exist. ... What I was witnessing, though I hesitate to use the word, was a resurrection--and a very believable one at that."

Quang Lieu, a Chinese Buddhist in Portland, Maine, said in the March 29, 1998 Maine Sunday Telegram that he feels the Internet is a powerfully spiritual realm that can connect us to the dead--such as the stepfather he memorialized--as well as the living. He even believes we can communicate better with the spirits of dead ancestors via the Internet than we can through traditional, tangible cemeteries and headstones. (On the other hand, some people think you can't replace everything with a computer and the Internet. Grumbles monument-maker Paul DiMatteo, "Nobody is going to remove a stone from granny's grave and say, 'This has been here long enough.'" Unlike a Web page, stone is forever.)

Sharon Mnich of Virtual Memorials would surely agree. "It feels," she says, "like I have 200 people [those she has memorialized] living in my guest room."

Does it all seem just too trendy for words? Perhaps it is, and perhaps it's all part of the constant exploration of potential that is the hallmark of this new construct we call the Internet or World Wide Web. But it is also telling us something important: We are not just our bodies.

We are our minds, the patterns of thought, feeling, and response we have constructed in that mass of jelly we carry within our skulls. This is where cyberoptimists such as Hans Moravec put their hope. Patterns, they say, can be copied, perhaps in a form akin to a computer program, and expressed in a computer, given a means to "live" just as when they were expressed in the brain-jelly. If they are right, we get the gravestones of my story, as well as the gimmicks in a great many other mind-download stories.

But we aren't just our minds, either. We are our connections to the world as well. And these connections are preserved when we--like Ian Brown--leave a departed friend's email address active, or when a virtual memorial draws comments from old friends, relatives, and even strangers. When those friends are ones left behind in the dust of the years, old connections are revived, and yes, there is indeed a sort of resurrection.

When a virtual memorial presents pages of pictures, documents, and so on, then much more of the "spirit" of the dead person remains than when there is only a casket, a eulogy, and a stone. The dead can no longer participate in the discussion of their concerns, but they can remain the center of that discussion in a way that has never before been possible.

You may object that it has always been possible for a few writers, scholars, and biographees to remain the center of their lives' concerns, and you're right. But those whose lives, minds, and concerns were captured in the form of books that remained on library shelves and available to readers have always been a very small minority. Virtual memorials make this kind of afterlife available to all.

Is it really an "afterlife"? There is much more of the departed's life in it, but to tell the truth it really is just as static as a granite obelisk. Yet that seems very likely to change. It is already possible to construct databases and the more elaborate expert systems, computer programs that use a defined body of knowledge to answer questions. It does not seem much of a stretch to foretell a stage in memorial technology when the static display of documents becomes a queryable database, or when it is turned into an expert system that at least crudely mimics the kinds of responses the departed would have given in life. The next stage will be artificial intelligence, a better mimic of memory and personality.

And finally--the download. The self itself. Not just a mechanistic sheaf of photos and memoirs and testimonials, not just a queryable database or even an expert system, but a self-aware copy of the person's mind. Able to converse and remember and think. Able to form new relationships, just as in "meat life." And able to go on, for as long as the sun shall shine.

I wish I could count on being around when that becomes a real possibility instead of a dream. But even the cyberoptimists don't want to bet on having the necessary technology sooner than about 2040, and I rather doubt I'll still be around then. After all, I'm already into my second half-century.

You, on the other hand, or some of you, should be there.

I envy you.

Dr. Thomas A. Easton is Professor of Life Sciences at Thomas College in Waterville, Maine. He has been the Analog book columnist for almost 20 years. His latest novel, Unto the Last Generation, is available only on-line, from Mind's Eye Fiction. Last year's Silicon Karma (White Wolf, 1997) was well received. His latest nonfiction books are Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial Issues in Science, Technology, and Society (Dushkin Publishing Group, 1995, 2nd ed., 1997, 3rd ed., 1998) and Periodic Stars: An Overview of Recent Science Fiction (Borgo Books, 1997).

Previous columns are available here.