In the 21st century, people have different ways of preserving their loved ones’ ashes. Throughout history, people have devised elaborate ways to memorialize the dead: the pyramids of Egypt, Europe’s Gothic mausoleums, the Taj Mahal in India.
What some mourners consider meaningful, others would call horrible.
In 19th-century Europe and America, “death photography” produced portraits of the departed in lifelike poses; in the Tibetan Buddhist rite known as sky burial (alms for the birds), earthly remains are set out to feed vultur
es.
Notions about honoring the dead are shaped by many factors—culture, tradition, geography, religion.
But the notion is one thing, and the execution is another. In every era, it’s the available technology that determines our range of memorial options.
The intersections of death and technology have long been busy crossroads. In these early years of the 21st century, they’re getting really interesting. It’s gratuitous and extreme and wonderful that we can turn our mortal remains into real diamonds.
Several companies worldwide now offer services to families that have the notion, and the resources, to memorialize their loved ones in arguably the most permanent wa
y possible.
The Swiss company Algordanza is one of them. Using high-tech heavy-industry machines, engineers can transform the carbon from human ashes into diamond gems that are physically and chemically identical to natural diamonds.
The geologic process that otherwise takes hundreds of millions of years can now be managed in weeks. It works like this: After the cremation, the bereaved family ships one pound of ashes to Algordanza’s laborato
ry in Switz
erland.
Scientists process the ashes to extract the pure carbon elements and remove other impurities. (The remaining ashes are shipped back.) From there, Algordanza uses the same tools Mother Nature uses to make diamonds: heat and pressure.
In the next step, the carbon ashes are converted into graphite, a stable allotrope of carbon in which the atoms are packed in
to tight, flat
sheets.
Then the carbon settles down for a long bake inside Algordanza’s high-pressure, high-temperature (HPHT) machines. Temperatures rise as high as about 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit. For comparison, consider that cast iron melts at about 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit. Then there’s the pressure.
Within the HPHT machine, a system of cubic presses exerts a force of 870,000 pounds per square inch on the graphite, gradually changing the molecular structure and transforming the carbon into pure diamond. To be clear, these diamonds aren’t just similar to a natural diamond; they are identical down to the atomic level. The gem that emerges can be kept in its rough state or cut and polished by Algordanza’s specialists.
The entire operation—from initial receipt of ashes to final delivery of the diamond—typically takes five to eight months. The company processes approximately 1,000 memorial diamonds a year and has representatives in 34 countries. Algordanza offers packages with prices starting at about $3,000, says Christina
Martoia, its U.S.
representative.
“The largest Algordanza memorial diamond produced to date was a 1.76-carat brilliant cut,” Martoia says. “The price was $38,000.” Candi K. Cann is one of the world’s leading experts on modern mourning.
She teaches comparative religion at Baylor University in Texas and is the author of the book Virtual Afterlives: Grie
ving the Dead in the Tw
enty-First Century.
She says that as a mourning custom, memorial diamonds and smart urns are really just modern iterations of much older cultural traditions. Both are associated with the psychological concept of continuing bonds. The idea is that keeping the decedent in one’s life, in some form, is healthier than the detachment of, for instance, putting Dad six feet under.
The diamond or the urn reflects “the need for continued rituals that incorporate and acknowledge the role of the loss of the deceased person,” Cann says. “It allows the living to grieve without being forced to ‘move on’ or forget the dead.”
