Andrew Sullivan links today to a classic essay on the evolving funeral industry.  One business noted: a company that markets bibliocadavers, books made from pulp mixed with your ashes.

This immediately brought to mind a book I've used in my classes on personal identity: the 1997 first edition of the collected Squadron Supreme by comics legend Mark Gruenwald.  As the excerpt below explains, Gruenwald provided for his ashes to be mixed in the ink of a comic book.  I'm afraid that I've shown my copy to enough people over the years that the small pieces have long fallen out, but if you look carefully in a number of panels (such as the second one below) you can still see the traces where his ashes left a mark in the ink.

It's all part of a seismic shift in human identity.  At a time when most people's imprint on life was emphemeral--subsistence living, trade, civic administration--a gravestone or an elaborate crypt was the most effective means of perpetuating one's identity after death.  Now we have the technology to express ourselves in a rich array of media--mixed into books; compressed into gemstones; even sent into space to fly through the stars--that serve as more organic extensions of our personal identity. 

"Death, where is thy victory?"--the impulse to triumph over the given conditions of our existence goes far beyond religion and a marked plot of land.