Life After Death

By Eliza Thomas Utne Magazine
Published on July 1, 2004

With just a little forethought and a few dollars, you can ensure
your chance to have the last word — even after your death. Two new
companies, lastwishes.com
and mylastemail.com, can
e-mail stored messages, videos, and photographs to a user’s friends
and family in the unfortunate event of his or her passing.
Mylastemail.com charges $9.99 for a three-year subscription,
complete with electronic storage space for up to five postmortem
messages. Lastwishes.com charges more — a $40 enrollment fee plus
$5 annually — but offers unlimited message space and perks like
the opportunity to create an electronic last will and testament. To
prevent morbid mistakes, the Web sites will release your messages
only after verifying your demise with a death certificate, or, in
the case of mylastemail.com’s ‘auto release’ option, after the
passage of an agreed-upon period of time without account
activity.

Karen Peach, who founded mylastemail.com, says her company
rescues the anxious from the chore of deciding what to say when
they’re parting (perhaps forever) from friends and family. ‘It’s
not always appropriate to leave the house every day and make some
long speech to your husband or children about how you might not
return,’ Peach told The New York Times. ‘We thought it
would be good to have a log to put your thoughts down where there’s
no danger of people coming across it.’

Consumers apparently agree: Mylastemail.com received over 5
million hits in its first couple of weeks online, while
lastwishes.com currently boasts more than 10,000 registered
members.

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