Death has a new domain

[Dover]

Death has a new domain
Friends and kin grieve, share updates on Internet
By Melissa Harris
The Baltimore Sun
Article Launched: 02/25/2007 01:00:00 AM MST


Columbia, Md. - During Jay Koontz's final days, as a brain tumor slowed his breathing, his wife sat at his bedside and quietly read him notes that had been posted on his website.

She had established the site to provide updates on Jay's condition - having found the grind of e-mailing updates to family and friends overwhelming. She also provided a spot for people to leave words of encouragement.

"I tell him your messages and he squeezes my hand to let me know that he has heard," his wife, Mary Catherine Cochran, wrote on the site the day before he died.

The Internet has revolutionized the way we work, shop and fall in love, and now it is rapidly changing the way people prepare for and mourn death.

Websites such as Koontz's, which provide real-time health updates, have grown more common since a pioneering blog documented online the final days of counterculture guru Timothy Leary in 1996...>

http://www.denverpost.com/nationworld/ci_5299159