Or her worst enemy. Or her parents, grandparents, brother, sister, cousin, whatever.
Diamonds, in essence, are just carbon, squeezed by heat and pressure into a hard rock and sold for too much money to those guilted into the purchase. You and I are carbon forms. Animals are just stacks of loosely organized carbon. Diamonds are densely organized carbon. So diamonds are basically dead things compacted – like wooly mammoths and dinosaurs and Uncle Frank and Sister Sara and Buster the dog – or a girl’s best friend.
A few years ago, LifeGem, a UK company, combined the guilt of diamonds with the sorrow of a lost loved one into a memorial you can wear: Your dead relative or pet. They basically crank up the heat and pressure and a drop dead diamond is the result. Better than an urn filled with ashes that can be spilled and mistaken for dust. Uncle Bob as a diamond is better than Uncle Bob in the bowels of your Electrolux.
Granted, wearing the dearly departed seems a little like taking Grandma down to DeWayne, the taxidermist, but I kind of like the idea in a sick and eternal way. Especially after seeing the movie “Blood Diamond.” If someone is going to die to bring me a fancy bauble – and many have over the years in the diamond mines of Africa, apparently – why not let it be someone I know and love? If you outlive your entire family, you can deck out like Liberace on his best night in Vegas.
The mob could start doing this to wise guys who rat out the family. Think Jimmy Hoffa is buried in Giants Stadium? Maybe he’s in a nice 2- carat pinkie ring somewhere in Brooklyn.
After all, a funeral costs a bundle and when they’re done hiding your loved one in a very expensive box, they hide the box in a very expensive little hole in the ground under a very expensive tombstone. You never see them again – unless you can wear them as earrings with that cute little black miniskirt and spike heels. Forget the tombstone and go for the gemstone. If you’re spending a few grand, why not turn them into a diamond. The ads say a diamond is forever. And who doesn’t want to live forever, well, at least hang around forever, cooked and faceted into a beautiful rock around someone’s neck. How romantic – like a rabbit’s foot.
Even the ugliest relative looks good as a diamond. And who knows, the stone you’re wearing in your ring right now is probably some poor schmuc who got caught in a volcano back in the Stone Age and traded his fur loin cloth for a half carat sparkly in the jewelrific afterlife.
A woman in England wears a diamond made from her dead father. She says it makes her feel he’s close to her. So explain to me how this is normal when people freaked out after hearing Keith Richards say he sniffed his father’s ashes with cocaine?
As I type this, a diamond commercial is on TV telling me to spend three months salary on a wedding ring. They don’t mention what it cost the former carbon form who was unlucky enough to get heated and squashed and displayed down at the mall.
What if everyone turned their dead loved ones into diamonds? Would the glut of dead people being diamondized cause a massive glut in the diamond market, making the historically valuable gem worthless? Since the fuels we use (like diamonds and us) are also carbon based, theoretically we could turn dead people and animals into gasoline, and put our loved ones, as well as a tiger, in our tanks.
