The business of online obituaries

Yesterday’s New York Times had an article about online obituaries. Specifically, it talks about the enormous effort by Legacy.com to screen out certain not nice things people may write on its web sites about the dead.

 

“Legacy is paid by more than 300 newspapers, including The New York Times, to publish their death notices and obituaries, and mourners can pay a fee to keep the guest books up longer. By attaching a publicly accessible guest book to most of the obituaries, the site has provided a new way to grieve, and in the process has all but cornered the market.

 

The company dedicates at least 30 percent of its budget, and 45 of its 75 employees, to catching the personal attacks and other inappropriate comments, nearly 200,000 in all, submitted each year.”

 

Personally I don’t know what all this uproar is. The purpose of these web sites is to give the living an outlet for their grief. And someone writing something like “you were a jerk in business school and your blog sucks” is his way of expressing his grief and he should be allowed to do that. After reading the article, I went onto the web page and typed in the names of a couple of a couple of deans, professors, and administrators I knew at UVA whom I suspect are close to their expiration dates. I was unable to find them listed but it gave me an excellent idea. Legacy.com should offer a subscription service where for a fee, I can create an account and enter the names of a number of people I want to keep a “watch” on and be alerted via email when an entry for them shows up. Better yet, I should be able to keep a “watch” on people with certain last names.

 

This reminds me of something. When I was at UVA I knew someone – I wasn’t friends with him but friends with his apartment mates – who once read in the paper about a student dying in a fire and sent her an email saying “I am glad you are where you are right now.” He didn’t know her but did it for the thrill of it. On another occasion, I was in the apartment and when the topic came up about another student who committed suicide, he sarcastically asked “what’s his email address?” I don’t know if he was joking or if he had gotten into the habit of emailing dead students.