Digital gravestone? Not for me, thanks. I’d be certain to press the wrong key – even in death TOM UTLEY

WHEN I die, please don’t let anyone erect a digital headstone over my grave. I learn from yesterday’s paper that a Slovenian firm has put the world’s first of these devices on sale, threatening a revolution in the way we mark the final resting places of those we love.

Each to his or her own taste, of course, but I have to say that the idea doesn’t appeal to me one little bit.

At £2,588 a pop, these high-tech memorials are said to look like conventional tombstones from a distance, displaying only the names of the deceased and their dates of birth and death.

But stand in front of their sensors for a few seconds, and you will activate a 48in touchscreen, showing photographs, videos and text illustrating the lives of the dear departed. An academic at Slovenia’s University of Maribor (no, me neither) is apparently working on a mobile phone app to let mourners hear the soundtrack of any video displayed.

Infernal

A thousand objections crowd into my mind. I don’t know about you, but electronic technology seems to be allergic to me. I have only to get near a computer for its screen to freeze or its programs to crash.

What if my mortal remains turn out to have the same effect as my living body? In the new age of the digital headstone, will every cemetery have to employ an IT department, staffed by whizzkids like those at the Mail who constantly have to rescue me when another day’s work disappears into cyberspace?

And what happens when the battery goes flat, or the electronic gravestone simply gives up the ghost, as ageing computers tend to?

Will mourning families have to keep buying new ones, like iPhone owners who upgrade every year (‘We’re waiting to replace dear Wilbur’s memorial until Tombstone7 is released in the autumn’)?

Then there’s the problem of hackers, from whom no electronic device seems safe. Imagine what fun they’ll have, posting pornographic images on the gravestone of somebody’s beloved spinster aunt, in place of photographs of her playing tambourine in the Salvation Army band.

How long, too, before pop-up advertisements start appearing among tributes to the dead? And how long before teenagers work out a way to play Grand Theft Auto on a digital gravestone?

No, for me one of the consolations of death will be the permanent escape it offers from the infernal contraptions of this electronic age. God forbid that they should pursue me to the grave, there to loom over my remains for eternity.

Another objection, surely, is that if digital headstones catch on, they will kill off the art of the epitaph. Yes, I know technophiles will argue that these marvels will enable us to record millions of words about our loved ones, with lavish illustrations to go with them, and room left over for any number of pious thoughts or apposite quotations.

But the epitaph is surely one art form in which less really is more, with a few words making far more impact than a mile-long essay.

High on anyone’s list of those that hit the spot, making the hairs stand up on the back of the neck, must surely be the famous inscription on Sir Christopher Wren’s plain, unadorned gravestone in his architectural masterpiece, St Paul’s Cathedral.

Translated from the Latin, it says simply: ‘Reader, if you seek a monument, look around you.’

Sometimes any words at all are superfluous, and dates alone are enough to set us thinking. Indeed, every day at lunchtime on my way to the pub, I pause at a gravestone inscribed: ‘To the memory of Ann Archer who departed this life 21 January 1821, aged 30. Also Mary her daughter departed this life 30 January 1821, aged 10 days.’

Powerful

What a story those dates have to tell about a mother who died the day after she gave birth, in that age when childbirth could so often be a death sentence. But as I reflect every day, at least poor Ann was spared the grief of seeing her baby die nine days later.

Another favourite of mine, which has stuck in my mind since I saw it on a childhood holiday in County Sligo, is the epitaph of the Irish poet W.B. Yeats.

Taken from his own poem Under Ben Bulben (his grave lies in a village churchyard at the foot of the beautiful minimountain by that name), all it says is this: ‘Cast a cold Eye / On Life, on Death / Horseman, pass by.’ I love the characteristically Irish fatalism of the words, which cannot fail to make us stop and wonder what life is all about.

I also remember being amused by that word ‘horseman’ (we were travelling in my parents’ Fiat 500), which was already beginning to sound old-fashioned when Yeats wrote the poem — one of his last before his death in 1939, well into the age of the motor car.

But of course the archaism was deliberate. Romantic old fraud that he was, Yeats reckoned rightly that ‘horseman’ had a more timeless feel to it than ‘traveller’, let alone ‘driver’. And a perfect epitaph, like death itself, surely ought to be timeless.

Indeed, that’s another powerful objection to the digital headstone, which in its nature is rooted in the here and now.

All of which brings me to my strongest reservation, which is more theological than aesthetic. No matter how tasteful the design, or how moving the material displayed, I can’t help feeling that a graveyard is not the place to celebrate a life, as if earthly existence is all that matters.

Denial

I feel much the same about the growing practice, imported from the continent, of setting colour photographs of the dead into a headstone. It seems somehow to be a denial of death and its permanence.

Yes, it can be extremely moving for a passer-by to see a picture of a laughing child on its grave. Nor would I argue for one moment that mourners shouldn’t keep such images at home, to preserve and cherish happy memories.

But how it must pierce the heart of a bereaved mother or father, visiting a beloved son or daughter’s grave, to be reminded so vividly that the laughing child in the picture is decaying just six feet beneath the ground. How it must intensify the grief. And how much harder it must be to let go.

Better by far, surely, to come to terms with the fact that where the dead are going — where we’re all going in the end — it doesn’t matter what we looked or sounded like in life.

Instead, we should accept with Shakespeare: ‘Golden lads and girls all must / As chimney-sweepers come to dust.’

As it happens, my own late father — blind from the age of nine — has a memorial plaque on the wall of his parish church, inscribed with the words from the Book of Job: ‘I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear; but now mine eye seeth thee.’

But there’s not a word or even a stone to mark his resting place in the little churchyard, where my mother now lies beside him. Just a clump of daffodils.

That’ll do me, thanks. But whatever becomes of me, just let me rest in peace from this digital age.