We Have a Winner

Since I started this blog about a year ago, I've written about the outrageous, the unbelievable, and the just plain stupid. It's often seemed that there were so many varied things wrong with our world today that they fell into an undifferentiated mass. Until today, that is.

Today, a co-worker sent me this link, and everything changed.

Yes, that's right. For a mere...well, okay, for several thousand dollars...you can have "the carbon from your loved one" made into a synthetic diamond and...you know...wear pieces of your dead friend or family member.

The process is simple, really. You just have your beloved cremated, ship the ashes off to LifeGem with a small boatload of money, and the company uses its "patented process" to press your loved one's carbon into a synthetic diamond just for you. You can also buy settings, of course, and cases, and everything else you might need to go with your chunk of dead relative beautiful new piece of jewelry.

The LifeGem website contains testimonials that I can only hope are faked. Here are a few excerpts:

"I've requested in my will that my children turn me into a diamond when I die."

"Knowing that my mother is in the stone and I can take her with me is an awesome feeling."

Some are even more...disturbing. I don't want to recreate those here because these letters, if they are real, were written by people who have suffered terrible losses and evidently are finding some comfort. Unfortunately, that comfort is being offered in a way that is not only disturbing, but extraordinarily expensive. The least expensive loved-one-turned-diamond that I was able to find on the website was $2,699. That's just the diamond--no setting or anything--and there's only one that comes that cheap.

Our loved ones, of course, are more than their carbon. It's unfortunate that a company has sprung up to capitalize on the pain of people in mourning by pretending that crushing a bit of their organic matter into a diamond is what remembrance is all about...and that if you REALLY loved your husband (or mother, or child, or wife, or cat), you'd go with the SEVEN thousand dollar diamond....