After births and open-heart surgeries online, it was only a matter of time before they got around to having the world's first Internet funeral.
Uitvaart.nl, a Dutch site that directs users to everything from flowers to caskets, will join a crematorium in Utrecht in offering funeral services live on the Internet. To kick off the new service, Uitvaart.nl will stage an elaborate fake funeral on Friday. Visitors to the site will be able to follow a complete ceremony: from the entry of the casket into the crematorium chapel until it's fed into the oven.
For privacy reasons, however, all Internet funerals will be closed to the general public. Access to the site Friday is by invitation, and only relatives and friends of the deceased will be able to log on to future funerals. Even though there's no real corpse for the dress rehearsal, webmaster Peter van Schaik felt it necessary to keep things private.
"I was afraid if I made this public, people would presume that everybody could visit the site during a real funeral," he said. "And that's definitely not the case." He stressed that a funeral service is an intimate affair and that outsiders shouldn't be looking in. But he's also afraid his servers couldn't withstand the traffic if the rather small site was accessible to everyone.
Van Schaik's idea stemmed from laws in the Netherlands that dictate the deceased be buried or cremated within five days. "It often happens that people are not able to attend a funeral because they are living abroad and cannot make it back home in time," he said. "The Internet funeral will end that problem."
Uitvaart.nl, which takes its name from the Dutch word for funeral, estimates it will be able to offer the new service for "several thousand dollars." And one of the largest advertisers on Van Schaik's site -- a funeral-insurance company -- is considering including the Internet funeral in its package.
Van Schaik said he has received several serious inquiries since he announced the service last week. "Someone was cremated this week whose granddaughter lives in the United States," he said. "But this woman was eight months pregnant and couldn't get on a plane to the Netherlands. For her, the Internet funeral would have been the solution."
