Webcast Funerals Growing More Popular

HughPickens.com writes: Lex Berko reports in The Atlantic that although webcasting has been around since the mid-1990s, livestreamed funerals have only begun to go mainstream in the last few years. The National Funeral Directors Association has only this year introduced a new funeral webcasting license that permits funeral homes to legally webcast funerals that include copyrighted music. The webcast service's growing appeal is, by all accounts, a result of the increasing mobility of modern society. Remote participation is often the only option for those who live far away or have other barriers — financial, temporal, health-related — barring them from attending a funeral. "It's not designed to replace folks attending funerals," says Walker Posey. "A lot of folks just don't live where their family grew up and it's difficult to get back and forth."

But some funeral directors question if online funerals are helpful to the grieving process and eschew streaming funerals live because they do not want to replace a communal human experience with a solitary digital one. What happens if there's a technical problem with the webcast — will we grieve even more knowing we missed the service in person and online? Does webcasting bode well for the future of death acceptance, or does it only promote of our further alienation from that inevitable moment? "The physical dead body is proof of death, tangible evidence that the person we love is gone, and that we will someday be gone as well," says Caitlin Doughty, a death theorist and mortician. "To have death and mourning transferred online takes away that tangible proof. What is there to show us that death is real?"

Comments

What a surprise...

[Rich0]

A bunch of people who make their living off of dressing up dead bodies and charging people to view them is concerned about people not wanting to come see dead bodies in person. Of course, saying it that way would be crass, so we get a bunch of ramble about the grieving process and how important it is to see dead bodies in person as part of that.

"To have death and mourning transferred online takes away that tangible proof. What is there to show us that death is real?"

Maybe the fact that Aunt Tilly no longer calls/emails you once a week to check up? Do you really need to see a body to know somebody died.

The real fear is that if showing up to an online funeral becomes popular, then people will start to question why they are spending so much money on dressing up dead bodies and propping them up for viewing. If everybody is just looking at an image of them anyway, why not just show a slideshow of photos of the deceased? And if you do that then you can dispense with the funeral services almost entirely. There might still be a gathering, but it could be anywhere. There might still be a religious service, but it might not include tens of thousands of dollars worth of embalming and equipment.

Re:What a surprise...

[umghhh]

embalming?

Where I live they clean up, cloth up and bury the dead. Sometimes we go for a celebration with family and close friends. Burial house gets its share of money anyway. You can save on quality of coffin and some such. You still need a burial house to bury or otherwise process the remains. There is usually a place where some speeches are done and/or people can say g'd riddance to the dead - they can skip that too and save on it, while streaming burning of remains (direct from furnace for additional fee). From this perspective I do not see why would anybody in the industry worry about this - if at all, this is an opportunity for additional fees (e.g. camera in the furnace etc).

I can hardly believe that sometimes too, but sometimes people have real concerns and do their job as well as they can. Maybe there are places where this is different and mostly driven by profit (Murica comes to mind) but I suspect, that this is a general human thing, so there are plenty of folks everywhere, that can combine profit drive with honesty, hard work and respect for others. This hardly applies to international companies and I would be hard pressed to name a corporation that does that (not at the levels above production floor).

Amen.

[drinkypoo]

They don't give one tenth of one shit about the grieving process. Some of them may have told themselves that to make themselves more comfortable sleeping on a gigantic bed stuffed with money. The mortuaries have managed to get themselves written into law and they're fighting tooth and nail to remain there. But ultimately, less of us believe in an afterlife than ever before, and thus we don't need a corpse present at a memorial. When I'm done, I'd like to have a tree stuck up my arse and be stuck head-down into the soil, thanks. Anyone who would like to remember me can do so in a drinking establishment.