More On Love And Death: The Life Gem

My wife is nuts. I mean, duh—she married me, so clearly she has a few bolts loose. Here’s an example: she seems to feel that the services provided by the people at www.lifegem.com are a great idea for dealing with earthly remains.

While not just a repositry for the remains of the deceased (they are offering a red LifeGem for Valentine’s Day), these folks claim that they will receive your loved one’s hair, and/or ashes in the case of the post-living, extract the carbon from them, and create a diamond from it. I personally don’t trust this service one bit. I do not doubt that it is possible, I just find it unlikely. It’s not verifiable that they’ll acutally use your loved one’s bits, but even so, how will you know, beyond doubt, that the essence of the donor is in there? More to the point, I think it’s kind of a huckster’s idea to begin with, and it’s ridiculously expensive.

More rant, and an alternate proposal for keeping the dead with the living, after the jump.

First off, in the case of making a gem from the living for the living, fantastic. If you have that much money to throw around, God bless you and so forth. I guess it’s better than letting her drink your blood.

In terms of dealing with the remains of the deceasd, however, let’s first deal with some terminology. Life insurance is inappropriately named—it should actually be called ‘death insurance’; you get a payoff when someone dies. It’s a finite amount and should be used sparingly on the incidentals. Cremations aren’t cheap. In fact, nothing dealing with a body is inexpensive, unless the body has been blown up or eaten. No matter what route you choose, you have to pay someone an astonishing amount of money to do something with the corpse because Uncle Sam has a lot of weird rules on the matter. [Let's save responses to that issue for a different post.]

The Life Gem expense is in addition to these costs, and the prices are obscene. Check them out here.

Bear in mind the small print: “Prices shown are for loose diamonds only.” So in addition to everything else, you have to choose a mounting, adding another fee. Then shipping, taxes, etc. In the end you’ve got an off-color man-made diamond on the smallish side for an astronomical fee that looks and feels no different than a piece of cut glass.

The best testament to a loved one’s passing I’ve ever heard of, and one I will likely take part in when my next loved on passes on is this:

I met a woman a few years back with whom I wound up comparing our tattoos. She saved the best one for last – it was a slightly rough looking calligraphy job on her inner wrist. I wasn’t particularly impressed until she told me that her mother had died five years earlier; she’d been cremated, and the woman took some of the ashes on a trip with her to some island in the south seas, where her mother was from originally. While there, she found a local tattooist who performed his art the old fashioned way—with a stick, a sharpened fishbone, some thread, and ink he made himself from squid’s ink, ashes, and urea. Okay, maybe not the most hygienic situation, but plenty natural, and hundreds of years of practice suggests it’s just fine.

Anyway, The woman used her mom’s ashes to make the ink with this guy, and threw the rest into the ocean. Then the artist tapped out her mother’s name into her wrist. Thus, her mom’s with her forever, in a sense. Can’t lose it, can’t fall out of a setting, don’t have to go someplace special to visit her resting place. I think that’s a pretty beautiful way to memorialize someone.