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By SCOTT ROSENBERG lost a loved one? Virtual Heaven is one of many sites on the World Wide Web that will let you post a memorial. Don't read Virtual Heaven's introduction too closely, though; the authors employed neither a spell-checker nor a bullshit detector. "Our heartfelt sympathies go out to all the friends, relatives and aquaintences [sic] of those dearly departed who now exist solely within these uncharted realms of Cyberspace. May some solace be found in the knowledge that the memories of those who enhanced and enriched the lives of others are able to exist, through the wonders of digitalization, indefinitely within this most eternal of sites." This paragraph captures all the pathos and inanity of the "virtual cemeteries" and memorial sites that are multiplying on the Web. Despite the prevalence among them of Hallmark-style floral graphics and banal euphemisms, there's almost always some core of genuine emotion at work. Mockery -- the typical reaction of first resort online -- is singularly inappropriate. Yet it's tough to keep respectfully solemn when faced with grandiose paeans to "the wonders of digitalization" and promises of eternal memory that are undercut by appallingly cheesy carelessness with details. Digital graveyards tend to be depressingly sloppy compared to the genuine article. For obvious reasons, stonecutters don't make typos. Some memorial sites are simply attempts to find a business niche in the hardscrabble online world. Many of these enterprises -- like Eternal Monuments in Cyberspace, Remembrance.com, and Memories Forever Ours -- charge anywhere from $20 to $100 to start with; then they tack on annual maintenance fees. Judging by the sparse population of these virtual boneyards, none of them is raking it in. Free sites, like the Virtual Memorial Garden or Deathnet's Garden of Remembrance, tend to do brisker business. (Deathnet just slapped on a $10-a-year charge, though, so don't be surprised if their numbers drop.) Still, however ill-executed and underpopulated these sites may be, they are clearly onto something. Online memorials -- whether distributed geographically or concentrated at some cemetery super-site -- hold the potential to be a kinder, gentler and more graphical update of the old-fashioned death-notice column. And instead of disappearing into dusty microfilm drawers, the words honoring the deceased live on through hypertext and search-engine hits. Many sites offer the opportunity for visitors to leave notes or offerings of "virtual flowers." But how much "eternity" can we really count on from the World Wide Web? Even if we assume that the Web itself sticks around for a long while, there's no guarantee that the Internet company you choose for your memorial is going to be in business in a hundred or even a dozen years. There is nothing particularly eternal about data, as anyone whose hard drive has ever crashed understands. In fact, the magnetic media on which we store most digital information tend to decay over time. On the other hand, it's simple to make copies of data -- to duplicate memorials. The Internet's promise of perpetual memory, therefore, is only as good as the archivist's back-up system. What's attracting people to the notion of the digital memorial? The same thing that attracted T.E. Lawrence, in "Lawrence of Arabia," to the desert: It's clean. It's a way of separating the act of memorializing a life from the organic mess of physical death. The undertaker's art is to dress up a corpse for funerary display; the Web takes this a step further -- there's no body at all. (There are places on the Web for truly gruesome, nauseating images of bodily decay -- like Deathnews -- but they are hardly fit for mourners, or indeed for anyone of humane sensibilities.) On the Net, death takes form not as an organic process but as an informational transaction. We increasingly put our faith in digital technology to organize our work lives, our financial exchanges, our social interactions and our entertainment pleasures. It seems inevitable -- if more than a little problematic -- that we will gradually come to view posterity itself as a repository of information and reconceive eternity as a big database in the sky. The desire to preserve human remains is understandable, but burial is more and more expensive, and there's less and less real estate. Besides, unless you're a devout believer in a religion that has strict burial rules, you may well prefer that those who come after you have access to a record of your achievements, words and images -- rather than a stone marked only with name and dates. The last thing anyone would wish for in a digital memorial, however, is something generic. Who wants to be represented to future generations by a look-alike Web page? That's why today's purveyors of Web cemetery space, with their maudlin inscriptions, are doomed. The future of Web memorials belongs to fully personal, idiosyncratic pages scattered across the Web, anywhere people want to remember someone they cared about. The tales of "virtual death" or "cyber-death" that have grabbed the most headlines are those of Timothy Leary's playful, ultimately abandoned notion of broadcasting his deathbed scene from his Web site -- and of futurist and online personality Tom Mandel, who tracked his own cancer on the Well and Time's (now-defunct) AOL boards. In one case, a celebrity set out to use the Web as a stage for his own take on an old social institution, the deathbed vigil; in the other, an online habitue turned his community of correspondents into a more intimate circle of witnesses to his own dying. Friends of Mandel now maintain a "Mandelspace" site as a permanent memorial, and any visitor to it can get a very clear picture of Mandel himself -- and why people have been moved to remember him this way. Residents of Montoursville, Pa., built their own Web memorial to 16 high school students who died in the TWA Flight 800 disaster. Pages like these will grow increasingly easy to create and inexpensive as the Web becomes more universal. They're not compromised by profiteering, and they are suffused with the sort of heartfelt emotion and attention to detail that remembering the dead demands. Of course, planting a memorial in the wilds of the Web can lead to unexpected consequences. When the City of Berkeley created a Vietnam Veterans' Memorial site, it opened up bulletin boards for visitors to post tributes to the town's war dead. The friends and relatives of Kenneth Robbins Cameron cannot have been pleased to have found the following posted on their page, signed by one Leon David Brownstone in Petrograd, Russia: "This guy was no young, innocent dupe of the imperialist scum in Wall St. and Washington. He was a professional killer in their pay. If he had died earlier, a few more Vietnamese might still be alive." This moldy crust of New Left rhetoric in turn aroused a storm of responses, mostly along the lines of "grow up" and "learn some respect," but some more vehement: "THIS SCUMBAG FROM RUSSIA SHOULD BE INTRODUCED TO THE TIGER CAGE." While flame-wars like this may not observe the decorum traditionally displayed in the presence of the dead, they are part of the psychic landscape of the online world. If we are going to build our memorials on the Net, we have to expect that its boisterousness and its disrespect will spill over into their precincts. Berkeley's wise open-mike approach allowed both the ranting Brownstone and his detractors to have their say; but if you read the whole discussion, you can tell where the community's sympathies lie. Still, this is not exactly the greatest atmosphere for the contemplation of mortality. What makes memorials on the Web attractive turns out to be the same thing that makes them troublesome: You can create a semi-permanent and globally accessible record of the dead, but once you do, everyone in the world can get at them. If you've made the site "interactive" in any way, you can pretty much count on the memorial being defaced in some way. We should hardly be surprised. People kick over analog gravestones, too. The Net may offer some new wrinkles on death, but it provides no harbor from such real-world assaults. Your serene tribute page, in other words, can easily turn into a platform for accusations of war crimes and invocations of "the tiger cage." Resting in peace isn't likely to be any easier online than in the ground. Are there Web memorials out there worth paying our respects to? Tell us about them in Table Talk.