Tuesday, May 09, 2000
E-mail from the other side
We boomers, self-important as always, now can make our thoughts known beyond the grave. Not simply a last will and testament or plans for our own memorial services, complete with canned eulogies from carefully preselected friends and relatives. Now we can have a cyber final word.
This is all courtesy of (what else?) a new dot-com company started by a 30-year-old lawyer who says he was reminded of his own mortality during a bumpy plane flight. Todd Michael Krim says he started thinking about “what I would have left unsaid and undone.”
After he arrived safely, he dreamed up the idea of posthumous e-mail.
One-stop shopping
He formed a company a year ago called FinalThoughts (www.finalthoughts.com) which now boasts 10,000 members in more than 50 countries. The company's Web page offers estate planning, funerals, genealogy and critical care. Plans are in the works for funeral broadcasting.
Remainstobeseen.com?
Meanwhile, they are taking orders for guardian angels. These are the people designated to hit the send button upon the death of a member, notifying recipients that they have a message waiting for them from the beyond.
The CEO of FinalThoughts says it's an opportunity to tell your friends and family how much you love them, perhaps mend some fences. It seems to me that once you've decided to tell them these things, there's no time like the present. Why wait until you have checked out?
But I can see some interesting possibilities for those we do not love. Perhaps a post-mortem shot to the Other Woman: “Your trysts gave me a chance to spend quality time with my very muscular personal trainer.”
To an ex-husband: “Sorry you spent so much money on Rogaine during our last few years together. Every time you cut up one of my credit cards, I put Nair in your shampoo. And in case you wondered why your other favorite pharmaceutical failed to live up to its billing, you should know that I made pellets out of PlayDoh and put them in your Viagra bottle.”
Or how about letting the snobs know you were on to them all along, but just too polite (while you were living) to say so. “We know you poured Passport Scotch into the Chivas bottles.” And, “your modern art is upside down.”
Perhaps a final honest answer to man's most dreaded question: “Yes, dear, that dress does make you look fat.”
Or to the boss: “I was stealing from the company for years. Thanks for the gold watch. And the villa in Aruba.”
Micromanaging
About 7,745 baby boomers will turn 50 every day for the next 10 years. That sounds like 28 million opportunities to sell us on our own hereafter. And encourage us to do one of our favorite things — meddle.
“Baby boomers have written their own wedding vows and are home schooling their kids,” says Lisa Carlson, executive director of Funeral Consumers Alliance in Hinesburg, Vt. “Now they want to take control of the death experience.”
The same sentiment is echoed not quite as kindly by Phillips Information, Inc.: “This site is great for all those boomer control freaks who can't stand the idea that death means the end of micromanaging their and everyone else's lives.”
To that, of course, we spoiled baby boomers would reply simply, “Byte me.”
E-mail Laura at lpulfer@enquirer.com or call 768-8393.
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