AND THE AWARD FOR THE MOST MORBID invention of the century goes to — Vidstone!

What is a Vidstone, you ask? It is a device that flips open to show an LCD screen and looks like a Nintendo DS. This screen plays five to eight minutes of a video featuring a deceased loved one.

Oh, and it is also mounted on the deceased̢۪s tombstone.

The Vidstone — also called a Serenity Panel — is quite possibly the creepiest way to honor the dead to date, not to mention the damaging psychological effects this invention can have on the bereaved.

The grieving process is hard enough once a person passes away. Is it really necessary to have available a video to watch over and over when you go to the graveyard to mourn their loss?

Psychologists say that the first task in dealing with grief is to accept the reality of the loss. Talking about the loss is part of the process in accepting it, and understanding the fact that the person is not coming back.

This where it becomes morbid.

Every time you would want to go and visit a loved one̢۪s tombstone to pay your respects, seeing the Vidstone video would be like refreshing that grief all over again.

Would you be able to handle seeing a live version, with audio, of that person in a place of eternal rest? Seeing the person in that video could trick your mind into thinking it was really them.

In effect, by viewing the Vidstone, you̢۪re not accepting the loss and therefore may never get past the first step of dealing with your grief.

Surprisingly, this Vidstone has actually been around for three years. The fact that it costs $1,500 to have one put on a tombstone may be one reason that there is still a small market for Vidstones.

I would rather take the money and invest it into something that would honor the person in a more rewarding method, like starting a scholarship fund for a deserving student in their name.

Now, as I was doing my research for this Vidstone, I came across several interesting forums discussing my very argument of the morbidity factor.

On top of the psychological effects, there were other concerns that I would not have even thought through in putting up a Vidstone.

The first was thievery.

A durable LCD screen is fairly expensive on its own, and with the Vidstone̢۪s capability to input your own video, I think it̢۪s safe to say that even the most rudimentary hacker could figure out the technology and use it to his or her own advantage.

Imagine how many Vidstone tributes of people could be altered for their own amusement.

Another concern was honoring porn stars with these Vidstones. Not only does this raise the question of possible X-rated Vidstones, but I don̢۪t think if family members of a porn star would appreciate people visiting their tombstone just to ogle at their video repeatedly.

There are a few, regardless of how precious few, positive points that these Vidstones could have.

I will be the first one to admit, it would be kind of cool to be able to visit the grave of Martin Luther King, Jr. and watch an original clip of him reciting “I Have a Dream,â€Â or the grave of Walt Disney and watch a video of his success with creating Disneyland.

It would be one of the interesting ways of letting people know what that person they are visiting accomplished in their lifetime.

On the other hand, it would probably creep me out once I realized that I was standing on or right next to their remains after watching that touching video.

So Vidstones — just how morbid are they? On my scale, 10 being the highest, they get an 11.

However, in a study done by the National Funeral Directors Association, 62 percent of people polled said that they would want some kind of personalization done in video or musical form.

I guess it looks like these morbid Vidstones could possibly be the wave of the future for the dead. As for me, I am perfectly happy with the idea of being cremated.

Jessica Lester is a senior at Fresno State majoring in English. She believes that J.K. Rowling is the literary role model of our time, and hopes to be an editor of Children̢۪s Literature one day.