Chapter 1
Introduction: Journeying into New Worlds of the Dead
The Question and the Journey
The question of what happens when we die has haunted both Western and Eastern cultures for as long as we have been able to keep records. Its nagging urgency tormented Gilgamesh at the dawn of history, and it haunts us just as deeply today as we push books about Heaven to the top of best-seller lists.1
The mystery and sorrow of dying are encapsulated, existentially, in the moment of passing. At one moment, the dying person is there, a functioning subject, a unique awareness. A moment later the person is gone and we are in the presence of a corpse. What went away? And where did it go? Did it go anywhere, or did it simply, and utterly, disappear?
And when we ask these questions, we are never asking them only about the one who has died. We are asking them about ourselves, about our own fate. As the philosopher Martin Heidegger writes, humans are “beings-toward-death.”2 We are, as the ancient Greeks also knew, the animals who are aware of their own deaths: to be human is to know that one dies.3
The problem is that when a person dies, and something goes away, we cannot see that something or touch it. For this reason, almost all attempts to answer the question of death posit the existence of a non-material, or quasi-material, realm where the invisible part of us—the soul—goes when we die. The Greeks believed in Hades, an underworld where souls lived on as powerless shadows of their former selves. Jews believed in Gehenna, which was also inhabited by shades. Christians and Muslims, and Jews, imagined a more welcoming Heaven, a blessed realm where the spirits and glorified spiritual bodies of those who had obeyed God lived in eternal peace and happiness. They also, however, imagined a Hell as terrible as Heaven was beautiful, where those who had defied God would spend an eternity in torment. Eastern religions also envision a domain beyond the earthly one. Hindu religion promises eternal bliss in a world soul, the liberation experienced in moksha, while Buddhism ambiguously offers peaceful oblivion, nirvana, after a long process of reincarnation on the way to perfection.
Philosophers from Plato onward have taught that we possess an immortal soul that, like the soul in Buddhism and Hinduism, can liberate itself from an endless cycle of rebirth by practicing asceticism in this world. Theosophists and spiritualists postulate the existence of Summerland, the neopagan version of an afterlife;4 the philosopher and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) even claimed to have visited there.5
There are skeptics about all this, and thoughtful people since the time of the Atomists and the Stoics have argued that the soul is nothing but a collection of atoms or cells, which disintegrates when the flow of oxygen stops. Finally, there are the millions of agnostics who agree with the philosopher Jacques Derrida when he says “Il y va d’un certain pas”: We do not know whether the departure of the spirit is the beginning of a journey, a “certain step,” or no step at all, a French pas (not), a non-step into—nothing.6
But whether we believe or not, we all agree that almost no one wants to die, unless his or her life has become utterly unbearable. And among those who no longer want to live, many still look forward to what will come next. And everyone who wants to live beyond his or her death will be interested in an account of human identity that promises personal immortality, especially if that account promises that we can live forever on our own terms, without having to please a judging God or pass through endless cycles of rebirth. A do-it-yourself, user-friendly Heaven might interest even skeptics and agnostics.
This book is the record of a journey I took, largely by accident, into a world in which such promises are being made, not by priests or gurus or imams, but by highly successful business executives, computer scientists, and even philosophers. I ask the reader to trace the steps of my journey with me so that you can decide for yourselves whether this promised afterlife finally resolves that ancient conundrum of death in ways that speak to the hearts and minds of those who live, increasingly, on screens and in the Internet Cloud.
The Beginning of the Journey
My journey to this new land began innocently enough with what would become a truly serendipitous experience. While I was researching an academic paper on how Americans represent the dead, my work took me to Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles, California. It was a place that seemed completely out of place: a large, elaborate burial ground that held the graves of Rudolph Valentino, Jayne Mansfield, and Mickey Rooney in an urban neighborhood of strip malls and auto body shops. I knew the cemetery had been doing some unusual things. Because they projected iconic horror films on the walls of their mausoleums and had a celebration on the Mexican Day of the Dead, I thought they might be doing something interesting with the ways in which they memorialized their “clients.” They were.
Hollywood Forever was offering a rather startling and innovative new service. In addition to operating a funeral home that handled interments and cremations in the traditional way, the cemetery was equipped to make biopics of the dead. They employed film students as well as professional film editors and sound technicians to craft cinematic narratives of people’s lives. They used video footage, sound bites, still photographs, music tracks, and taped interviews featuring bereaved family members and friends of the deceased. Sometimes the deceased themselves, before they died, and knowing their end was inevitable, would consent to be interviewed and filmed. Clients contracted to pay for these services, the cost depending on the length of the film. The cemetery encouraged people to allocate more resources to these online memorials and to spend correspondingly less on traditional funeral accoutrements.
This new service represented a creative marriage of Hollywood film skills with mourning rituals. The dead would still be buried or cremated, would still have religious services and memorial events, but they would now also “star” in their own movies. What I found most interesting was a Hollywood Forever website (www.hollywoodforever.com) that included a “Library of Lives,” where all of the films of the dead were stored. Family members and friends could access the films by typing in the name of the dead person accompanied by a password. Cemetery management installed kiosks containing computer screens and keyboards on the grounds of the cemetery. One could use these terminals to key in a name and password, and hear and see one’s dead loved one as one gazed at his or her final resting place.
As technology developed, the cemetery included more Internet opportunities. It began to offer real-time streaming of funeral services. Thus, one could watch a loved one’s biopic, attend his funeral, and leave messages of condolence on his “Library of Lives” page without ever leaving home. And the dead person would always be there, to be accessed by anyone with the right password.
It struck me immediately that this was a new form of immortality that exploited the fact that the Internet is “on” all day every day in every part of the world. Although the spirits of the dead might go to Heaven or into the Great Void, digital versions of the dead could live on, online, forever, whatever else one believed.
It also struck me that not only was this a new form of immortality, but that this could be the starting point for a development that could go much further. When I first visited the “Library of Lives” in 2004, the iPod was cutting edge and the iPhone was still years in the future. Social media sites like Facebook were barely starting up, and Instagram, Pinterest, Vine, and Twitter did not exist. People still depended on desktops to connect with the Internet, and the now common sight of roomfuls of people staring at smartphone and tablet screens was still a year or two away. But as I write this chapter the Hollywood Forever dead are truly “portable”—available on every phone and tablet, as close as a keystroke or voice command.
When I wrote my paper about the Hollywood Forever online films in 2006, I speculated that perhaps someday in the near future the people who ran cemeteries and mortuaries would begin to adapt the sophisticated computer-generated imagery (CGI) technology that computer games were already perfecting to make online avatars of the dead that could be programmed to interact with the living. I published the paper7 and forgot my speculations. Years later, in 2011, a former student who had just started working on his Ph.D. in Philosophy at Southern Illinois University invited me to present two talks on death to the graduate students in his program. I had one talk all but done, a discussion of Jacques Derrida’s writings on death and specters. But I had no idea what I wanted to do for the second talk. I reviewed my presentations and articles on death and found the piece on Hollywood Forever, with its forgotten speculations about interactive online avatars of the dead.
I had my topic—afterlife on the Internet, or Internet afterlife. I had nothing to go on but my old hunch, so I went online to see where death had gone on the Internet since last I looked. This hunch led to this book for, to my great surprise, I found new worlds of and for the dead online that went beyond what Hollywood Forever had done, and that confirmed my one-time hunch about using game-based online avatars to represent the dead. This presence of the dead online was partly a function of the fact that most Americans have a complex set of online identities that live on after they die because the Internet has no expiration dates. As anyone who has ever posted an imprudent image on their Facebook account knows, information released to the Internet seems to have an immortal life all its own. Second, as our emotional, business, and shopping lives migrate progressively onto the screens that are coming to dominate our lives, it seems natural that our death rituals and narratives should make the same journey to the Cloud. What was innovative, even unique, in 2005—Hollywood Forever’s “Library of Lives”—had become a commonplace by 2011.
In addition, we Americans have always loved the idea of an afterlife, from traditional Christian and Jewish versions to exotic New Age creations, and we have never been reticent about designing Heaven to suit our desires. Ever since we Americans wrested control of our death narratives8 from the funeral and medical establishments, a move that has been afoot since the antiestablishment rebellions of the 1960s, and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s—we have been reconceptualizing Heaven in a variety of creative ways.
This new world of the dead online, that we have collectively constructed, bit by bit, from the late 1990s forward, and which represents the current chapter of a longer-term American appropriation of the afterlife, comprises the first part of this book. I discovered that there were virtual cemeteries, YouTube memorials, Facebook legacy pages and group memorial pages, services that promised to post tweets after one died, and others designed to send postmortem emails and publish personal journals. There was a strange site called MyDeath Space that posted obituaries for people who had committed suicide, died in accidents, or been murdered. Every mass shooting and natural disaster, from Sandy Hook to Katrina, had its memorial site, as did the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, of course, had several active memorial sites, and the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide and Srebrenica all had special memorial websites, as did sites that memorialized African Americans who had been the victims of police shootings. There were sites for deceased pets, and specialized memorial sites for every religious preference and gender identification.
I also discovered, to my surprise, a complex world of what I call curatorial and archival sites that offer every kind of postmortem protection for, and management of, one’s business and financial affairs. There are sites that keep one’s will under doubly encrypted virtual lock and key, online “vaults” for powers of attorney, Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) protocols, birth and marriage licenses and certificates, and every other form of official document, including bank account numbers and passwords and information about paying recurring bills. Some online sites offer interconnected services, from pre-need funeral planning to financial advice to grief therapy. Everything about one’s death and legacy can be managed, and there are additional services designed to permit access to one’s social media pages and email accounts to designated executors.
All of these memorials and services merit examination and commentary, and the first leg of our journey will take us into this world of online cemeteries, Facebook memorials, and virtual vaults. It is my aim that this journey will provide readers with an understanding about how Americans are looking at the dead, and at their own deaths, in the age of the Internet. You may find people you know as you take the journey; I can assure you that you will be touched and moved by what you find in the online worlds of the dead. You might find ideas about how you want to be remembered—you probably already have a deathless online presence, and what you discover here can help you learn how to manage it.
The Journey Continues: Serendipity, “Intelligent Avatars”
The memorial and social media sites did not offer examples of the interactive online avatars of the dead that I had speculated on in 2006, so I continued my journey. Once again, serendipity came into play: My endless Google searching led me—I have no idea how—to a site (although now out of business), called Intellitar, which stood for “intelligent avatar” and hosted another site called Virtual Eternity (virtualeternity.com). This site promised to utilize information users provided to create intelligent online avatars that would look and sound like their creators and that could eventually be programmed to interact with friends and family members after the person who created the avatar died.
In chapter three I will take up the question of how the online avatar, so familiar from the world of computer games and Second Life, has become a vehicle for Internet afterlife. The Intellitar avatars, which resembled the chatbots that Ikea and other companies use to assist online customers, seemed a promising beginning of something new, strange, and rather remarkable about the “future” of death online. But due to legal issues concerning the rights to the necessary software, the Intellitar site never got past the construction phase, so my quest remained unfulfilled. Its failure led to further searches, and I eventually discovered three more sites that will be discussed at the conclusion of the first half of the book and lead us into the second half. The first site, Eternime (eterni.me), created by people associated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is currently working with a small subset of its initial subscribers to develop the software needed to accomplish what Intellitar failed to do—create interactive online avatars of the dead. The second site, MyLifeBits (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/mylifebits/), is a portal to specialized software developed by Jim Gemmell and Gordon Bell of Microsoft that will allow individuals to record every facet of their lives and transfer it to online databanks, so that the avatars envisioned by Eternime can become a reality sooner rather than later.
The third site, maintained by the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) at the University of Southern California, has two projects. They are developing interactive online avatars for the Defense Department for one project. These “avatar-counselors” will offer therapy to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) sufferers and train soldiers how to negotiate with village leaders in Iraq and Afghanistan. Later civilian users of the same software will deploy virtual physician assistants to help people get quick medical diagnoses and advice for minor medical problems. ICT’s second project concerns the development of a hologram of Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter in order to continue his witnessing to audiences in the future, long after he has died. This hologram will look and sound like Gutter, be able to both share his story of survival and answer questions from live audiences. It will be another rather startling example of Internet afterlife. These three projects represent a different strategy for dealing with the online dead than the more static memorial and archival websites because these undertakings exploit the “cyberspace” dimension of the Internet, rather than its page-driven Web dimension.
Interactive avatars of the dead are a fascinating step beyond Facebook memorials and online vaults, but these beings are in the end very sophisticated versions of Apple’s Siri and Anna, the Ikea chatbot. They are not the actual dead online, but brilliant replicas of the dead. This may seem obvious—but as we will see, these replicas may create a suspension of disbelief so that they appear to be the dead loved one—as if that loved one’s subjective, actual consciousness were “existing” online. We can conceive of this as a kind of deceptive version of virtual afterlife, one that falls short of answering the eternal human question about what happens to our subjectivity when we die and whether digital technology can become a “home” for it.
These concerns led, in my dissatisfaction, to the next, unexpected, step on my journey. My uneasiness led to the serendipitous discovery of two sites that seemed to promise an answer: 2045 Initiative (2045.com) and LifeNaut (www.lifenaut.com). These two sites promised, perhaps threatened, to change everything we have believed about death and which had led me into the world of “real” Internet afterlife. In this world, the people hosting these sites promise that by 2045 digital immortality will be available to anyone who wants it. These two sites, and the new movement, dubbed transhumanism, which they represent, are where I will complete my journey. The second half of the book is a detailed guide to a brave new world that just might be the shape of your future and mine.
Situating the Journey in the American Death Narrative
Before we embark on those journeys, from online cemeteries to digital immortality, let’s pause for a moment to locate ourselves in a cultural and spiritual sense. If we fail to do this, we could easily lose our bearings and find ourselves in a strange country with no map to guide us and no easy way home. We do not want to lose ourselves while traveling in the land of the dead.
Americans, since the Puritans set up the first colonies, have been telling stories about what happens when we die; our journey into the world of Internet afterlife can be understood as a continuation of these American ideas about death. These are narratives that have been an integral part of the American experience, are essentially American, and are informed with themes that continue into this new world of the afterlife that we are about to explore. Before exploring that new world, it is helpful to situate it as part of this American narrative experience.
Four interlacing themes inform these narratives. Not surprisingly, the first is an unfailing optimism—probably one of the traits we most associate with Americans. Connected to this optimism is another very American trait, a kind of practical sensibility that manifests in what we can call a “do-it-yourself” confidence. A third theme is a belief in the permeability between the world of the living and the dead. This theme reflects that American optimism as well as the practical know-how or do-it-yourself ethos. Finally, the fourth theme, not surprisingly, integrates the first three in a faith in technology—a technology that bridges that boundary between the living and the dead and is a result of that American practical confidence in individual ingenuity.
My discovery of these themes informing this uniquely American narrative began also serendipitously. My first introduction to the subject was a chance discovery. Even in this digital age nothing can match the serendipitous delight of wandering along library shelves and finding what one has really been looking for ten or fifty books away from the one you thought you were seeking. In my case the book was not anywhere near where I was looking. As I was perusing the shelves of my university library, I chanced to glance at one of those carts librarians use to trundle books back to their proper places. I was taken by a strange, thin book that caught my eye because it was quite a bit larger than the ordinary format. Its name was Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America.9 Upon opening it, I was shocked by its beautiful photographic reproductions. They were daguerreotypes. Each page held a single image with a brief title underneath. The images were clearly from the earliest days of photography. And every one of them was of a dead person, carefully clothed and arranged, sometimes in a narrow coffin, sometimes sitting propped in a chair, in one case standing erect, with eyes opened.
I spent the next few hours devouring the images. I looked closely at every page, then reexamined many of them. I was repelled and fascinated by turns. A set of questions arose: What would lead otherwise sane people to think that producing such images was a good way to remember and honor the dead? Daguerreotypes, I soon learned, could only be produced using expensive, heavy equipment that required training to handle. These images were not snapshots or, God forbid, images snapped by a cell phone. They had to be made by professionals who were called to a home on purpose. And the images themselves were not casual takes. They were carefully arranged scenes that involved dressing the corpse in his or her finest clothing and arranging him or her just so.
Exposure times were long—minutes at a time—and the images were incised on a specially prepared metal plate. There were no negatives, so each shot had to count. And once the images were produced they were extraordinarily fragile. Only a small fraction of daguerreotypes has survived because the images are so easily scratched. Those that are preserved had to be encased, immediately, in frames with glass covers.
So, why would people do this? I think it is because we love Heaven so much. We Americans have always loved Heaven, even when access to it was restricted, as in the days when the Puritans controlled death narratives in the New England colonies. But Calvinist pessimism, which condemned the great majority of people to damnation, could not survive the powerful current of American optimism that developed during the first Great Awakening in the middle of the eighteenth century. America was, after all, the “shining city on a hill” described in St. Matthew’s account of the Sermon on the Mount, a source quoted in the context of the American self-image by the Puritan John Winthrop on the ship Arbella even before the colonists landed at what was to be Massachusetts Bay Colony.
One sees American optimism about death, and the fate of the dead, graphically represented in New England gravestones of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the early days when Puritans held sway, the tympanums of the simple slate headstones bore images of skulls and crossbones. But these grim figures were very soon crowded off the markers by new generations of images, which started out as simple faces and evolved into cherubic, happy souls, faces framed by wings, speeding toward Heaven. These faces in turn gave way to peaceful symbols of mourning. Weeping willow trees, cut roses, and for children, resting lambs, marked the changes in the conception of death. From an event that filled people with terror, to one in which the souls of the dead flew to Heaven, to a sad but beautiful event in which the dead were reconnected to nature—Americans imposed their sense of exceptionalism even on the dead. And when they replaced images of souls with flowers and trees, this meant that the dead had been freed from the constraints of traditional theology and had become part of beautiful nature.
This optimism about death allied itself to the theme of permeability running through America’s cultural imaginary, the idea that the dead remained close to the living: Even if they had gone to Heaven, they are accessible. Contrary to Hamlet’s plaint that death was “The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn No traveller returns” (Hamlet, Act III, Scene 1), Americans believed that the dead hovered around the living, and that it was a good thing to act to keep the dead as close as possible.
These beliefs—that all Americans get to Heaven and that the boundary between Heaven and Earth is permeable—help explain why, when photography in the form of Daguerreotypes came to America in 1839, one of the first uses people made of cameras was to make preternaturally clear images of the newly dead. The idea of making portraits of the dead had roots in spiritual, one can say metaphysical, shifts in American attitudes toward the dead, and can be seen also as reflecting that American penchant for optimism. Two features matter. First, one does not feel comforted by seeing representations of family members, after their deaths, if one has a fair presumption that said family member is suffering in Hell. If Americans adopted the custom of commissioning portraits of the dead, or often of the dying—because such portraits had to be done quickly using the corpse as a model—then they must have abandoned this severe vision of the world, in which most people went to Hell, and replaced it with one in which few people, at least few respectable people, would end up there.
This metaphysics—articulated to some extent in American Transcendentalism, but more vigorously and popularly in the waves of religious revivalism called Great Awakenings that swept both the colonies and the new republic—expressed a new optimism, as did the Enlightenment deism of many of the intelligentsia and the politically active and/or moneyed classes. This was not a systematically developed vision—as anyone who reads Emerson knows—but a complex of sensibilities, apercus, feels. But it was powerful and pervasive and made postmortem portraits culturally possible.
Photography was “light writing,” a felicitous marriage of empirical accuracy and Platonic idealization that suited America’s spiritual vision perfectly. When sunlight “wrote” its images on metal plates, focused by lens but never either manufactured or guided by human hands, what resulted was an image that combined empirical precision with an almost mysterious revelatory power. Light and lens not only captured exactly what was there without filtering it. They also revealed details, and a holistic truth about the person or thing, that the vagaries of a flitting, inattentive, or biased human gaze could not. Photographs revealed what was always already there, but that went largely unnoticed: the deeper moral and metaphysical truth about a person. Nathaniel Hawthorne alludes to this in his House of the Seven Gables10, when Holcroft, the protagonist, makes a daguerreotype image of Judge Pyncheon that reveals the latter’s otherwise hidden malevolence. So Americans were drawn to this new technology of representation for epistemological, moral, and metaphysical reasons. The new technology told the truth, a deeper truth than unaided human sight could tell.
Adapting the new light writing technology to the representation of death meant that Americans did not fear seeing the deeper truth about the dead. Only if one believed that the dead were morally pure, blameless, could they be safely exposed to the truth-telling power of photography. For this reason, these early photographs were displayed in the parlor, the room where Americans entertained guests. Images of the dead would “greet” visitors, and every effort was made to represent the dead as if they were still alive. Postmortem photographs kept the dead as integral members of their family, and were a vehicle for the dead to contradict Hamlet.
The same optimism and belief in the closeness of the dead was expressed in the rural cemetery movement that began at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1831. The rural cemetery was a new cultural formation that used the latest advances in landscape design to create “dormitories” for the dead, peaceful places where they could “sleep” until Christ returned to judge the living and the dead.
Rural cemeteries were the first American suburbs. They were purposely designed to be picturesque, that is, on an aesthetic scale halfway between the formality of the beautiful and the wildness of the natural. They featured hills, ridges, dense vegetation, and winding paths. Each family would purchase a plot, usually 300 square feet. They would erect a fence, as if this were an upper-middle-class home, and plant trees and flowers around the graves. Whole families would ride out to the cemetery in carriages and spend a Sunday afternoon picnicking among the dead. The rural cemetery dead were held close, “sleeping” in a fenced family plot, in what amount to a gated community that had its own rules and security patrols.
As Americans were taking photographs of the dead and visiting them in their dormitories, they were also communicating with them through mediums, table rappings, and Ouija boards. In 1848, seventeen years after Mount Auburn opened and nine years after the first postmortem photographs appeared, the adolescent Fox sisters heard what they believed to be spirit rappings in their home in the Burnt-Over District of New York State. Their experience struck a chord, and Spiritualism became a parallel religion for millions of Americans during much of the nineteenth century, despite the suspicions that spiritualist claims aroused, and despite the fact that one of the Fox sisters later recanted her claims. Not only were the dead nearby in images and in graves, they were literally present, if invisible, watching over the living and offering advice and reassurance.
Spiritualism further confirmed the theme of a faith in technology in the American relationship with death. Photography used nineteenth-century chemistry to fix the images created by the camera obscura, a technology that had been developed in the Middle Ages. Cemetery designers used the latest design ideas to craft charming resting places for the dead. But Spiritualism made the connection between American death and technology explicit. The spirits first appeared at almost the same time as the telegraph was first invented. And one of the first descriptions of Spiritualism’s contact with the dead was that it was a form of “Spiritual Telegraph” in which the dead used electrical devices exploiting the newly discovered principles of electromagnetism to contact the living.
The important difference between Spiritualism and traditional beliefs in Heaven was and is that Spiritualism gives the living, and the dead, far more control over their fates, and by extension over death and its meanings, than traditional religion affords. The premise is that the dead are not under the control of the traditional postmortem binaries of Heaven and Hell, nor do they act at the behest of any god. They seem to be wandering free in some ill-determined border region that has little to do with traditional versions of the afterlife.
This tendency to see the afterlife as a do-it-yourself project is well represented in that genre of literature that Anne Douglas named “consolation literature” in her essay “Heaven Our Home.” This was a genre that included both fiction and nonfiction that arose in the United States in the decades before the Civil War. Consolation literature had one subject: death, both the process of dying and the business of mourning, with greater emphasis on the latter. But in the case of its most popular practitioner, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, it was detailed descriptions of the afterlife, what a critic called “the annexation of Heaven,” that added the idea of a user-friendly afterlife to Americans’ optimism about death, their belief in the closeness of the dead, and their faith in technology to connect them to the dead.
This literature represented the merging of several strains in the culture. First, urbanization and the development of commerce and industry radically altered the status of women in society. Many women were now compelled by circumstance to enter the urban workforce under less than ideal conditions, at the same time as large numbers of more economically advantaged women were leaving lives devoted to agricultural labor and entering a world in which women were primarily stay-at-home mothers and protectors of the home and its morality.
Second, the new urban environment was crowded and dangerous. Epidemic disease carried in impure water supplies and poorly prepared food made urban death rates high. Middle- and upper-middle-class people had scarcely more protection than did the poor. Consequently, large numbers of young privileged people—people with every advantage but antibiotics and strong immune systems—were dying before their times. And such people, well taken care of by doting parents, but now suddenly dead, were being written about with enormous affection and hope.
Again, Americans, this time progressive mainstream Protestants, were writing about their experiences and feelings surrounding their dead children, and in so doing were pushing forward the idea that death, though tragic, was also sweet because parents could provide every comfort to the dying and could also hope, happily, that their separation from their children was temporary. This is a literature of reassurance that, in texts such as Stepping Heavenward, verge on early self-help books about proper grieving. The point is that once again Americans felt confident that the way to Heaven, to the afterlife, was open and non-mysterious, and that the dead hovered close by.
The seamless continuity between this world and the afterlife was reinforced by the work of the aforementioned Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, whose 1866 Gates Ajar, written to commemorate her brother who had died in the Civil War, was the best-selling novel of the American nineteenth century after Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Phelps, in this and other books (The Gates Between, Beyond the Gates),11 created fictions in which deserving but underappreciated women would die, or appear to die, and would then visit elaborately described Heavens. Gates Ajar, supposedly about the protagonist’s dead brother, is really a closely argued case for a radical revision of mainstream Protestant conceptions of the afterlife. This opened the “gates” for her later works in which her heroines learn languages, travel on diplomatic missions, listen to new music by Beethoven (offered in concerts in which the audience enjoys eight or nine senses!), and have religious-erotic meetings with Jesus.
Far from being mere consolation, this literature forwarded the emerging feminist agenda but also did something radical that was noted in Harper’s Magazine in 1881, in a piece provocatively titled “The Annexation of Heaven.”12 Phelps not only connected this life and the afterlife, affirming in a radical new way that theme of permeability, she also remade Heaven to fit her feminist and more conventional ideals—articulating that other very American do-it-yourself pragmatism. Her Heaven is egalitarian, filled with career and educational opportunities for women, and also provided with lovely upper-middle-class homes in which women find perfect male life partners and raise perfect children. For Phelps, Heaven has become a simulacrum of upper-middle American life, and, as such, represented that American optimism that informs all the other death narrative themes.
This brief historic overview illustrates what is clearly a uniquely American confidence in reaching the afterlife, an equal confidence in being in touch with that realm, and a boldness in reshaping it in one’s own image. These traits all continue, as strong as ever, through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. My discoveries at Hollywood Forever and my subsequent pilgrimage through online memorials to YouTube tributes and beyond, all the way to the transhumanist visions that promise to resurrect the dead in digital form, reflect this same American optimism about death and the afterlife, as well as American beliefs that the dead are close, that we can use technology to contact them, and that we have both the right and the power to design the afterlife in ways that favor both the living and the dead. American “annexation of Heaven” has not stopped yet and, as you will see, has reached places, some would say extremes, that Americans in the nineteenth century could never have imagined.
It is now time to go to Heaven, together.
The Final Search....?