-
Sep 16, 2005 4:43 pm US/Pacific
-
Digg |
Facebook |
E-mail
|
Print
Green Graves: A Virtual Way To Remember The Dead
by Dana King
(CBS 5)
It's the next big trend, but it's not fashion, and not food. Funerals will double over the next 50 years, with baby boomers leading the charge.
A man named Tyler Cassidy has an idea for dealing with all of those deaths. His cemetery sells environmentally friendly funerals called 'green burials.'
Mary and Ray Zablotny remember how much their son Jonathan cared about the environment. He used to put empty soda cans in his pocket until he could find a recycle bin.
"He liked all the ecologically sound ideas," Ray Zablotny says.
Jonathan's parents don't know why the High School Senior took his own life last February. They did know how they wanted to honor his memory.
"I think the green burial would have appealed to Jonathan. I think he would have been happy with this," Mary says. "I knew Jonathan would hate the 20th Century way of burial."
To the Zablotny family, the 20th century way of burial means a whole lot of waste. Every year, more than a million tons of metal and wood goes into the earth, along with almost a million gallons of toxic embalming fluid. Even cremation releases toxic gasses into the air each year.
Keeping death green is where Cassidy's business comes in. If there is a hot shot in the funeral business, he is it. He bought his 33-acre Marin burial ground for less than $500,000. Since then, 50 people have been buried in the natural meadow.
Green burial is meant to return people to nature, leaving only a tiny physical trace. But the people buried at the Fernwood Forever cemetery won't be forgotten, thanks to some high-tech help. Everyone is buried with a digital identity chip. Using GPS technology, a device can identify every body.
"We're sort of merging a little bit of natural and virtual here," says Fernwood Manager Kim Sarnecki. "We can still have information about history and people in the database...so we always know where everybody is."
Gary McRay is Fernwood's digital caretaker. His Hewlett-Packard prototype computer provides an interactive tour guide to the dead. The device is also a virtual Tombstone, showing photos and even video of a deceased person's life story.
"It's memory. It's good," Cassidy says. "It's keeping the past alive in us by giving us the tools to do so."
Tyler grew up around his family's funeral business. He and his brother were the inspiration for HBO's 'Six Feet Under. He then became a consultant for the show.
When one of the fictional brothers died on a recent episode, it was Tyler who suggested a green burial. Now he has a studio that produces the live story documentaries that will play on the virtual tombstones.
The bits and bytes of people's lives are edited into 15-minute segments called chapters. Each chapter costs $1,000. Tyler says that all of those life stories will be permanently stored in the cemetery's database, where they will be available online for future generations.
"There is no institution in society for the common person or for everyone to store permanently their memories," Tyler says. "That's why we put these stones with people's names, so they'll be remembered. It's just--we have much better ways to evoke people than that."
The Zablotny's agree. They say the video tombstone gives them another way to recall fond memories of their son.
(© MMV, CBS Broadcasting, Inc. All Rights Reserved.)