5 Ways People Ruined Loved Ones' Lives After Dying

5 Become A Tattoo

They say that when a loved one dies, a part of them will always stay with you. Andreas Wampl must have heard this phrase at some point and interpreted it in a very literal and terrifying way. He would go on to start the wholly unnecessary company Skin 46, which sounds enough like a '90s grunge band that it's not very surprising what they actually do.

This company will take "genetic material" from your loved ones, such as their hair, and turn it into tattoo ink, so you can permanently etch them into your skin. Theoretically, there's nothing stopping you from obtaining the hair from a total stranger and getting that tatted onto yourself, but that's some serial-killer level shit that we want nothing to do with.

Wampl is proving that the concept is viable by getting one of these tattoos himself, made out of the hair of his (still alive, we hope) two children. He says that, while he's excited to receive the tattoo, "it is a strange feeling -- the fact, that I will have my children visible and physical in me." Which is a sentence that would probably get you sent to prison under about 23 different circumstances.

But if you're the type to freak out over human hair in your tattoos the way Gwyneth Paltrow freaks out about hair accidentally getting into food, there's the option to take your dead relative's ashes and mix them into tattoo ink. It's not a popular trend, since we still aren't sure of the health risks of injecting charred human into one's skin, but if you really want, you can turn your loved ones into a series of Chinese characters that probably don't mean what you think they do.

4 Or Just Frame Your Terrible Tattoos For Your Loved Ones

Everyone loves the idea of getting a tattoo to forever proclaim their love for dolphins, but we all have the same reservation about the process: What happens when you die, and people no longer get to look at your awesome ink? Well, worry no more, because the National Association for the Preservation of Skin Art is here to physically remove your tattooed flesh from your corpse, as if Hannibal Lecter was operating out of a back alley in Las Vegas.

The heavily-tattooed mind behind this project, Charles Hamm, started the organization after realizing that the thousands of dollars he spent on tattoos would go to waste after his death. Now, for the low price of about $60 a year, you can have a family member contact NAPSA after your passing, and they'll come by to extract your tattooed skin from your body and put it through their preservation process. According to Hamm, their process brings out the color of the ink and makes the tattoo more defined, which will certainly help take your mind off the fact that you have a chunk of your mother's back framed in your living room.

It's possible that after your passing, you could have the pieces of your body divided up and distributed to your heirs, making every family reunion uncomfortable for the rest of time, no matter where it's held. This could finally be the excuse we need to get our scrotums tattooed right before we die of old age.

3 Become A Robot Clone

Martine Rothblatt, CEO of Sirius Radio and the highest-paid female CEO in the nation, is using her fortune to drive bigger and better ventures. After her daughter was diagnosed with a rare lung disease, she founded a biotech company. This would have been a great venture with which to honor her daughter if they were focusing squarely on things like curing lung cancer, but that's not quite what happened. In the biggest case of "that escalated quickly" the world has ever seen, she's built a robot clone of her wife, Bina Aspen, named BINA48.

BINA48 is known as a "mind clone", which Rothblatt describes as "a digital copy of your mind outside your body." A number of Aspen's thoughts and emotions have been converted into computer code and uploaded into an AI, which was further uploaded into a robot that we're forced to assume shares Aspen's approximate likeness, because there's no way this doesn't get mentioned in the eventual divorce proceedings.

There's a bit of a bigger problem: Robotic minds aren't exactly advanced enough to mimic a person yet, and Rothblatt suspects it will be several decades before we get to that point. One writer has said that conversations with BINA48 "often descended into a crazed babble." So until science catches up, you're able to create a dumber and more off-putting version of your spouse. We can't imagine how that could possibly aid in grieving, but hey, if it helps one person, maybe it's worth it.

2 Send Posthumous Text Messages

People have been writing letters for loved ones to open after their death for centuries, so it's not like communicating from beyond the grave is a totally foreign concept. The thing with those letters, however, is that they were mostly a one-and-done prospect. Technology, of course, has finally caught up, and thanks to SafeBeyond, you can queue up text, photos, videos and such to be delivered at certain points after your death.

Where this gets interesting is that you can designate a trusted person to help you out with a bunch of these texts. You set up the basic message, and the trustee will fill in the details (if they need changing). Alternatively, you can skip that altogether and use the system to scare the bejeezus out of your (former) friends and family.

See, the program uses GPS technology to trigger a text message. If something big is about to happen, they'll get an alert from dead-you. You could send your son a reminder of what a disappointment he is as soon as he sets foot inside a McDonalds, and all he'd be able to do is sigh and be glad you're dead.

The base package includes one GB of data per month, which will handle a handful of videos, but you could also splurge on a 30-GB-per-month package, letting you deliver wall-to-wall video messaging for every moment of the remainder of their waking lives. Your children will grow up thinking of you as the parenting equivalent of a Vine account, which is going to be really annoying if Vine ever goes out of business.

1 Become A Creepy Perfume

Our sense of smell plays a huge role in determining whom we're attracted to, and while it's a little weird to talk about, people will often miss the scent of their romantic partner once they're gone. They'll hold onto old clothes, pillows, and other things that still hold the smell of old sweat and off-brand deodorant that turns people on. But now, widowed partners everywhere can get a concentrated dose of instant memories, thanks to one enterprising company that's selling what they should be calling Eau de You.

A French company called Kalain is able to take the clothing of a deceased loved one (or some other fabric they regularly interacted with) and create a bottle of perfume to smell like that person in as little as four days. The perfume comes in a nice box and will set you back roughly $600, which may seem pricey on the surface, but if there was ever anything to blow your entire Social Security check on, it's this.

Our keener readers will note that you technically don't have to die to give up some old clothes for this nightmare. Company founder Katia Apalategui has thought of this, as the company also offers packages for "temporary absences." She mentions that this could make a Valentine's Day gift between lovers, or even as something for children who miss their parents on holiday, which is taking it to a much weirder place than we had thought. Children don't need to be learning about pheromones that early.

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For more ideas to apply to your rotting carcass after you've passed, check out The 5 Most Bizarre Things People Have Done With Dead Bodies and The 6 Coolest Things You Can Do With Your Dead Body.

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