Pam Cronrath wanted to honor her husband. She didn’t expect it would cost her fifteen times what she’d budgeted, or that it would involve the kind of technology usually reserved for dead pop stars making surprise appearances at award shows.
Bill died last year after nearly sixty years of marriage. Pam, 78, lives in Wenatchee, Washington, a quiet agricultural town on the eastern edge of the Cascade Mountains. She’d promised Bill a “super wake” with a $2,000 budget. What she created instead was something stranger, more ambitious, and far more expensive: a hologram of her late husband speaking directly to two hundred people at his memorial service.
According to BBC reporting, Pam had watched a doctor appear as a full-body hologram years earlier at a medical conference. The memory stuck with her. After Bill’s death, she began wondering if the same technology could preserve his presence, his voice, his jokes. When she approached companies about making it happen, most weren’t interested or couldn’t justify the cost. Eventually, she connected with Proto Hologram and Hyperreal, firms that specialize in this emerging corner of the memorial industry.
The final bill was “at least 10 to 15 times” her original plan.
The Uncanny Valley of Remembrance
What makes the Cronrath project different from other digital-remains technology isn’t just the ambition. It’s how it was built.
Most systems that allow the deceased to “speak” after death rely on pre-recorded answers to anticipated questions. Software then selects the most relevant clips to respond in the moment. It’s clever, but it’s constructed. Remington Scott, founder of Hyperreal, describes his company’s approach as “comprehensive capture” of likeness, voice, motion, and performance. The goal is creating something that feels immediately recognizable to people who knew the person, not an approximation.
For Pam’s project, there could be no live recordings of Bill. He was already gone. So Pam did something more intimate and more labor-intensive: she wrote the script herself, drawing on six decades of shared life. “I knew him for 60 years,” she said, “so I wrote it the way I believed he would speak.”
The voice proved most difficult. Bill was quiet, reserved. Recent recordings reflected his declining health; older ones sounded stronger. Engineers had to split the difference, aiming for something his family would recognize even if it wasn’t perfect.
When the hologram appeared at the service, life-size and from the waist up, the reaction was visceral. People were genuinely confused about how it was happening. The hologram didn’t just recite a prepared statement. It participated in a staged Q&A with Bill’s nephew, even cracking jokes. One attendee believed the whole thing was happening live. Pam’s own son noticed only one small detail: the voice was “just a little bit off.” For Pam, that tiny imperfection meant they’d gotten startlingly close to perfection.
Seven months later, she still watches the recording. One moment in particular haunts her: when the hologram says, “I love you.”
The Problem Isn’t What You Think It Is
Here’s where things get complicated, and where the story stops being sentimental and becomes genuinely unsettling.
Pam is careful to stress that the hologram hasn’t replaced her husband or her grief. It’s a tool for remembrance, she insists. Like old photographs or home videos. A way to feel closer to someone you miss. The experts quoted in the BBC reporting aren’t sure that logic holds up at scale.
Dr Elaine Kasket, a cyberpsychologist at Bath University’s Centre for Death and Society, points to a deeper risk: positioning grief as a problem to be solved with technology. “If an individual griever wishes to use digital remains to remember their loved one, that is their grief,” Kasket said in the reporting, “and we should not question or criticise other people’s needs and preferences in mourning.”
But there’s a catch. Kasket warns against what she calls “the platformisation of grief” - datafying our dead, commodifying them, making mourners financially and psychologically dependent on the platforms that keep them animated. That’s the real danger lurking beneath the emotional story.
Dr Jennifer Cearns of Manchester University’s Centre for Digital Trust and Society adds another layer: these technologies call for caution partly because “grief and longing can make people vulnerable.” The question isn’t just whether we can do this. It’s whether we should encourage grieving people to spend tens of thousands of dollars on holographic performances when they’re at their most emotionally exposed.
Intent Versus Impact
What’s striking about Pam’s story is how deliberately non-commercial it was. She initiated the project herself. Her family was involved at every step. Scott emphasizes that what they created was “closer to commissioning a portrait or a memoir than anything else.” This wasn’t some company exploiting a widow’s grief. This was a woman with means, tech literacy, and a specific vision executing it.
That nuance matters. And it also terrifies companies in this space, because it won’t last.
The moment this technology becomes easier, cheaper, and more accessible, the ethics get murkier. Right now, only relatively affluent people with tech connections can afford custom holograms. But technologies get commodified. They get packaged. They get sold on grief. Somewhere down the line, you’ll see ads promising to resurrect your loved one for a flat fee, with a terms-of-service agreement that gives some company ownership of their digital likeness.
The real question isn’t whether Pam should have done this. It’s what happens when thousands of bereaved people are encouraged to do it by an industry that profits from their pain.
Pam understands that holograms of the deceased might disturb some people. For her, it was never about novelty or spectacle. “It was about Bill,” she said. “About honouring his humour, his kindness, and the way he made people feel.” She calls it part of their life story. Bill and Pam, still talking after he’s gone.
But somewhere in that impulse to preserve presence, to extend connection beyond death, we’re also inventing new ways to make grieving feel like a technological problem that requires technological answers, and that might be exactly what we should worry most about.
