Exclusive | Long Live DeathTech: The Futuristic Ways Grieving People Are Memorializing Their Loved Ones

Hannah Malamute was always there for Candace Nixon.

The 35-year-old marketing agency owner from Austin, TX adopted her dog when she was a puppy, and during their 13 years together, Hannah was always by her side, through four different cities, nine house moves, five jobs, college and everything. that life threw at him in his twenties and thirties.

“She was always there, waiting to welcome me home,” Nixon told The Post. “She stood by me, loving me unconditionally.”

When Hannah passed away in October 2022, Nixon wanted to do something to keep her memory alive – so she had her ashes in a diamond ring from a local company, Eterneva.

“I look at her every day and remember all the beautiful experiences she brought into my life, feeling a sense of peace and gratitude that is hard to describe in words,” she said.

Eterneva is one of a growing number of companies that take the ashes of loved ones – human or animal – and turn them into something more tangible for people to treasure. These tech entrepreneurs have revolutionized so-called “DeathTech,” changing the way we process what happens behind the curtain.

Grace for the masses

In the last 50 years, the popularity of cremation has increased significantly in the United States.

According to the Cremation Association of North America, 60.6% of Americans are now cremated when they die, up from just 5.69% in 1975. And it is predicted that by 2035, 80% of Americans will be cremated.

All Eterneva needs is about half a cup of the deceased’s ashes or hair, from which they can extract and purify the carbon, before placing it in a machine that mimics the pressure and heat conditions from beneath the Earth’s crust to create a unique diamond.

To date, they’ve created over 4,000 diamonds, including ones for celebrity clients like Bret Michaels and Kenny Chesney and, as CEO Adelle Archer explained, is particularly popular with a younger demographic. “It’s a generation that has a much more open relationship with death,” she said.

“People are becoming more secular, which means they are looking for personalization and meaning, rather than just adherence to tradition, when it comes to end-of-life rituals.”

Austin resident David Blake started his business, Spirit Pieces, in 2015, initially as an international concept for distributing ashes, but it soon became clear that customers wanted a more physical token of a person’s memory to preserve.

Now they produce a wide range of jewelry and embellishments using ash. “When you hear sayings like ‘My son always kisses his dad goodnight’ with his dad’s ashes on a bedside globe, you know things like that have a real impact,” he said.

DeathTech

As Blake explains, there is also a growing market for custom parts, with some requests more unusual than others.

Recently, they were asked if they could make a 2-meter tall palm tree in the mosque that includes a person’s ashes. “It would have been amazing, but we couldn’t see how we’d be able to ship it across the country without breaking down, so we had to turn down the project,” Blake said.

One Spirit Pieces employee Jen Hasseler recently lost her mother and decided to use some of her ashes to create a one-of-a-kind piece.

“My mother was my best friend. “She was an incredible, beautiful, funny woman with unwavering strength and conviction and I believe she would smile to know that her remains have been put into something so beautiful and peaceful,” said the 54-year-old. “It’s about having tangible things with me to help ease the pain.”

What Eterneva and Spirit Pieces prove is that people don’t just want to leave an urn on a shelf.

That’s why Jason Leach’s business, And Vinyly, is booming.

Based in Scarborough, England, Leach takes the ashes and presses them onto custom-made vinyl discs, complete with voice recordings of the deceased and some of their favorite music. The cover and inner sleeve also feature photographs and memorabilia of the person and he now has clients around the world, including many in the United States.

With a background in the music industry, Leach’s brainchild was inspired, in part, by his family’s efforts to spread his great-grandfather’s ashes. “They got out to sea, but they got thrown in the wrong direction and the wind blew them back in everyone’s faces,” he says.

He was also inspired by writer Hunter S. Thompson, who died in 2005.

“I had heard how he put his ashes in a firework and set it off in the sky and it made me think about what I would like,” he says. “And then it struck me that I would like my great-grandchildren to have a record with me on it and be able to hear me speak.”

While most customers visit And Vinyly after the death of a friend or relative, an increasing number are now planning their details before the fateful day. “I think that’s beautiful,” adds Leach.

“And that’s the good thing about death—it teaches you to live.”

Come back to life

Artificial intelligence, meanwhile, has also seen great advances in what can be done to maintain the presence of those who have left.

Amazon’s Alexa, for example, can read bedside stories in the voice of dead relatives while Microsoft has patented a chatbot – or “ghostbot” – that can digitally “reanimate” the dead, using old videos on social media and voicemails to recreate. an online presence that the dead can interact with.

But it doesn’t have to be so scary.

Dr. Stephen D. Smith is the CEO of StoryFile, a technology company in Los Angeles that specializes in holographic conversations. As co-founder of the UK’s National Holocaust Center and Museum, Smith initially planned to use his technology to preserve the memories of Holocaust survivors, but its wider application soon became apparent.

StoryFile creates digital clones of people using 20 synchronized cameras to record them answering a series of questions, which are then processed using AI to help create natural responses to questions after they are dead. The technology made headlines when it was used at the late actor Ed Asner’s memorial service in 2022.

Smith even used it when his mother, Marina Smith, died that same year.

Before her death, she spent several hours recording answers from the StoryFile database of 250,000 questions and, at her funeral, was able to answer some of the questions mourners had, creating the illusion of actual conversation.

Last week, he also created a StoryFile about his recently deceased father-in-law. “I found it refreshing and meaningful to engage with his StoryFile,” he says. “It was a poignant reminder of what a wonderful character he was.

“Something like a living, talking digital photo album.”

For Candace Nixon, who named her marketing agency Wise Wolf Consulting as a nod to Hannah, her unique creation is a permanent reminder not only of her dog Hannah, but of something much deeper.

“It represents love, and if one looks closely under a jeweler’s microscope, one will see the inscription I chose: ‘How lucky am I?’ from AA Milne’s quote, ‘How lucky I am to have something that makes hard goodbye.”

“Just because it’s gone, it doesn’t mean love’s going anywhere.”