Delivering Messages To The Dead

[rynner2]

This one leaves me rather gob-smacked.
Original link:
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,5987253%5E11869,00.html
Link is dead. No archived version found.

THERE'S no shortage of options for communicating with deceased loved ones, but ouija boards are passe, seances plain creepy and as for channellers, well, how's one to sort the crooks and cranks from the real thing?

American cartoonist Paul Kinsella reckons he's stumbled upon a perfectly logical, foolproof method for communicating with loved ones who have passed beyond the veil: send your message via someone who's about to join them.
Kinsella's scheme is to have terminally ill patients memorise messages and then "promise" to deliver them when they reach the "other side".

Naturally his service demands a fee, a "modest" .50 a word, with a minimum five-word limit.

Kinsella says he pockets only half the money. The rest goes to the ghostly messenger's family, a charity of their choice or towards paying medical fees when they finally succumb.

Kinsella stumbled across the idea about 15 years ago after watching a comedy, Blankman, in which a superhero sends a message to his grandmother via a man he was unable to rescue. He says, unashamedly, that starting his Afterlife Telegrams service was motivated solely by "profit" and the "bragging rights" associated with starting a new business.

Naturally, there are no guarantees the message will be delivered, but Kinsella pledges that patients will memorise messages before dying and they will "promise" to seek out the addressee and deliver the message in the afterlife.

"The truth is that no one knows what happens when someone dies," Kinsella, 31, says on the website. "Since we can not guarantee delivery nor prove that a telegram has been delivered, our customers do not pay for 'deliveries', they pay for 'delivery attempts'. If I could guarantee it I'd be charging a whole lot more and even more than that if I could get messages back.

"What we can guarantee is that the messengers have memorised their telegrams before passing on and that messengers have promised to do what can be done to deliver their telegrams to the addressees after passing."

ANOTHER reason he refuses to offer promises of delivery is that the afterlife is allegedly divided into three -- heaven, hell and a limbo of sorts. He has no way of knowing whether the "courier" and the recipient will be in the same place.

Kinsella's messenger service has so far signed up only one terminally ill patient, a male friend with liver disease. He says his friend, whose prognosis is grim, is "fully cognitive".

HE acknowledges he needs more messengers, but says he doesn't actively recruit and has no interest in doing so.

Instead interested parties must complete an online form and register their interest.

All applicants must be adults in full control of their minds. They must have been diagnosed terminally ill by a doctor and have a minimal survival prognosis of one year.

Once payment is received, a copy of each telegram is given to the terminally ill person who must memorise it over a certain period.

Provided the patient lives, they are periodically quizzed to ensure they have not forgotten the messages.

When the messenger dies the sender is informed by phone that "the message is on its way" and, should the messenger have the good fortune to survive for more than a year after the message is memorised, all money is refunded and the messenger will deliver the telegram, when the time comes, for free.

Kinsella says he has only one client so far, but his service has endless potential: from informing a dead friend or relative of a birth and inviting them to a seance where they can chat freely, to apologising to a soul who had been wronged when they roamed Earth.

Predictably, Kinsella refutes suggestions he may be exploiting people who are still grieving.

His response? He carefully"vets" potential clients.

"Our service is not intended for people who are still in the grieving stage," he said.

"Therefore, we will not knowingly provide service to someone who wants to send a message to someone who has died fewer than 30 days ago.

"We also do not provide service to people under the age of 18 nor anyone we suspect are mentally incompetent."

 

[Anonymous]

WHAT....does he really think that people are so gullable.?????

Did this guy used to write for the muppetts?????

 

[Pete Younger]

Why do some people only remember that there are some things they wanted to say after a loved one dies, get it said now before it's too late.

 

[Anonymous]

Like in the song.

 

[JudgeNutmeg]

I'm not sure if this is a case of life imitating art as i seem to recall that this was a story line from "The Bill"from years ago.A so called minister of some kind was taking money from folks to get dying people to pass on messages to the other side.
Not that many Americans would have watched ITV.

 

[Pete Younger]

Like in the song.

Quite so.

 

[butterfly27]

The people using this service must think their messages are pretty important if they're prepared to pay $8.50 per word.

And the messenger has a chance to live longer than expected now that he has a purpose in life and can earn while he's terminally ill.

Though I'm not sure which is worst, exploiting the relatives of the dead, or exploiting the terminally ill.

 

[escargot]

Reminds me of the story about Queen Victoria visting Disraeli on his deathbed-

Victoria once paid Disraeli the honor of visiting him at his country house near Beaconsfield. On his deathbed, Disraeli declined a second royal visit:

"Not it is better not," he explained, "She would only want me to take a message to dear Albert ..."

 

[Anonymous]

Didn't he complain that she kept asking him to pass on a message to Albert or something?
Mind you he was a bit dry in his humour, old Dizzy, so it could be a fib.

 

[Anonymous]

A cartoonist?

Now I know who does all the cartoons for the Rollickin' for the Rapture' site.

"Can you hear me now, Saddam?"

 

[escargot]

Yup Eburacum, you are right. I hadn't finished my post when someone turned up here & I was distracted and didn't put in Dizzy's actual words.

Dizzy was certainly a wit and I believe the story as it seems typical of his dry sense of humour!

A sister of my Ma's died at about age 4 after a long illness. On her deathbed- when she hadn't been informed, of course, that she was dying- she said, 'I am going to be an angel soon. Then first Dada will come, then Mama. Shall I tell Grandma?' - Grandma being of course dead.......

Her parents died in the specified order many years later.
(Lots of other spooky stuff around this family and deaths too- brrr.)

 

[EnolaGaia]

The Afterlife Telegrams website has been defunct for some time. The latest archived version of the site's homepage (at the Wayback Machine) is dated July 2014.

The latest known and archived (2012) version of the Afterlife Telegrams FAQ page can be accessed via the Wayback Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/2012051...elegrams.com/THE_AFTERLIFE/faq_afterlife.html

... in case you'd like to see the details of how this service was advertised and operated.

 

[EnolaGaia]

I'm not sure if this is a case of life imitating art as i seem to recall that this was a story line from "The Bill"from years ago.A so called minister of some kind was taking money from folks to get dying people to pass on messages to the other side.
Not that many Americans would have watched ITV.

According to Afterlife Telegrams founder Kinsella he got the idea from a forgettable movie ...

Kinsella says he got the idea for this novel project, which he launched last September, from the 1994 Damon Wayans cinematic bomb, "Blankman," in which the Blankman asks a character who is about to be blown up to deliver a message to Blankman's dead grandma.

It took a while for Kinsella to refine the concept, in part because "fortunately most of us go through our whole lives and don't find someone who's about to be blown up."

That's when he came up with the idea of using terminally ill volunteers.

SOURCE: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2003-03-11-0303110040-story.html

 

[escargot]

Why do some people only remember that there are some things they wanted to say after a loved one dies, get it said now before it's too late.

Awww, Pete, I often told him how much he made me laugh and cheered my days.

Nobody could mock me like Pete did. I do hope he knew how fond I was of him.