Last year, when Bill Cronrath died after nearly 60 years of marriage, his widow Pam faced a familiar grief. What she did next was anything but ordinary. According to BBC reporting, she spent somewhere between $20,000 and $30,000 to create a hologram of her late husband so he could appear at his own memorial service.
If that sounds like something out of a sci-fi thriller, the reality was more human. Pam, 78, lives in rural Washington and describes herself as a tech enthusiast. She’d seen hologram technology used in a medical conference years earlier and couldn’t shake the idea: what if the same technique could let people say goodbye?
The journey from idea to execution wasn’t clean. She wanted it done quickly and cheaply. Neither happened. Finding companies willing to work on a rural memorial service proved difficult. When she finally connected with Proto Hologram and Hyperreal, the scope ballooned. Her original $2,000 budget became something closer to 10 or 15 times that amount. But she went ahead anyway.
The Technical Challenge of Speaking for the Dead
Here’s where it gets complicated. Pam couldn’t record Bill answering questions because he’d already passed. So she did what any spouse of 60 years might do: she wrote his eulogy in his voice, drawing on decades of knowing how he’d phrase things, what he’d find funny, how his mannerisms worked.
The hardest part was his voice. Bill was quiet and reserved. Recent recordings captured his declining health. Older ones sounded too strong. Engineers had to thread a needle, finding a middle ground that family members would recognize but not hear as artificial. According to the BBC reporting, one of Pam’s sons noticed only a minor flaw. “His voice is just a little bit off,” he observed. For Pam, that near-miss was actually confirmation they’d nailed it.
When about 200 people gathered for the service, most had no idea what was coming. Bill’s hologram appeared life-size from the waist up, speaking directly to the room. “Now, before anyone gets confused, I’m not actually here in Valhalla today,” the hologram said. “Is this going to be fun?”
The reaction was visceral. Some guests genuinely couldn’t process what they were witnessing. The hologram didn’t just deliver a scripted speech either. It participated in a staged Q&A with Bill’s nephew as host, even cracking a joke about marrying Pam despite his nervousness being “the best decision I ever didn’t make.” Several attendees believed the exchange was happening in real time.
Why This Matters More Than Just Spectacle
Remington Scott, founder of Hyperreal, stressed that what his company does differs from other “grief tech” offerings that rely on pre-recorded responses or AI approximations. “Comprehensive capture” of likeness, voice, motion, and performance creates something people who knew the person recognize immediately. Scott compared it to commissioning a portrait or a memoir rather than a technological fix for death.
That framing matters because it gets at something deeper than novelty. Pam was careful to emphasize that the hologram hasn’t replaced Bill or her grief. “It’s like looking at photos, or old videos,” she said. “It doesn’t get boring. When you’re hurting, it helps to feel like that person is still right there with you.” Seven months later, she still watches the recording regularly.
But here’s where the harder questions arrive.
The Ethical Minefield Nobody’s Mapped Yet
Experts aren’t dismissing what Pam did, but they’re flagging real concerns. Dr. Elaine Kasket, a cyberpsychologist at the Centre for Death and Society at Bath University, points out that positioning grief as a problem with a technological solution can backfire. She distinguishes between personal choice and systemic pressure: “If an individual griever wishes to use digital remains to remember their loved one, that is their grief, and we should not question or criticise other people’s needs and preferences in mourning.”
The real problem, according to Kasket, is what she calls the “platformisation of grief” - when companies start datafying our dead, commodifying them, and making mourners financially dependent on platforms to keep them animated and accessible.
Dr. Jennifer Cearns at Manchester University’s Centre for Digital Trust and Society raises another angle: consent and vulnerability. Grief makes people malleable. They’ll spend money they maybe shouldn’t, pursue solutions they wouldn’t normally consider, all in search of connection. These technologies demand caution, she argues, especially when it comes to whose likeness is being used and whether the person who died actually agreed to it.
Pam’s case sidesteps some of these problems. She initiated it. The family was involved at every step. She spent her own money on her own terms. But as this technology becomes cheaper and more accessible, will every hologram memorial look like Pam’s labor of love, or will some look like exploitation?
The Uncomfortable Question Nobody Wants to Answer
Technology continues reshaping how we communicate, mourn, and remember. Pam’s story raises a question that doesn’t have a clean answer: just because we can resurrect someone as a hologram, should we? And more pointedly, who gets to decide?
Pam understood that some people would find the idea unsettling. She wasn’t chasing novelty or spectacle. “It was about Bill,” she said. “About honouring his humour, his kindness, and the way he made people feel.” It’s a small, human answer to a technology that feels anything but human.
As these tools proliferate, the real test won’t be whether they work. Pam proved they can. The test will be whether we can use them thoughtfully, or whether grief becomes just another market for companies to monetize.
