Loss isn’t rare or exceptional. It is part of every life. As we live longer, we gain more time for love and more encounters with loss: parents, partners, siblings, friends. 

Grief, health, and longevity 

Loss leaves a mark. Grief is not only emotional, it is physical. Studies show the death of a loved one can disrupt sleep, weaken immunity, and increase risks of cardiovascular disease. Danish researchers recently found that people with intense, prolonged grief symptoms had an 88% higher risk of dying within ten years. A small minority, perhaps 6–10%, develop prolonged grief disorder, where mourning becomes a chronic, life-limiting condition. In other words, grief is more than a feeling. This research shows its effects reshape the body as much as the heart, with consequences that can last a lifetime. 

The rise of “life after death” technology 

For centuries, memory was the way we carried love forward, in rituals, recipes, songs, stories. Today, technology is stretching that further. Since 2022, a Chinese startup, Super Brain, has created digital avatars for more than 600 families, designed to simulate conversation with the dead. In the US and UK, companies like  StoryFile, and Somnium Space are building tools for “digital immortality.” These systems capture voices, gestures, and memories, creating virtual clones that can keep talking long after someone has gone. At first glance, this sounds like science fiction. In practice, it offers both unease and possibility, either a new way to sit with loss, or a reminder of what can never be replicated, depending on your point of view. 

When Sci-Fi Starts to Look Familiar  

Fiction has been rehearsing these futures for years. In Apple TV+’s Sunny (2024), a grieving woman is given a domestic robot by her late husband’s company. The machine offers comfort but also unease: is companionship real if it is manufactured? 

A decade earlier, Black Mirror’s Be Right Back (2013) explored a similar terrain. A woman resurrects her partner through an AI clone, built from his digital traces. At first, the replica consoles her. Then its limits appear, it never surprises and it never quite gets the laugh right. He is both present and absent and the absence becomes louder. 

Both stories point to the same tension that technology can mimic ‘presence’ but it may also sharpen the awareness of what has been lost. 

Loss as part of living longer 

Grief does not stay contained in memory; it shows up in our bodies and across our lives. Which raises harder questions for a longer-lived world. If loss is inevitable and its health effects measurable, what responsibilities do communities, governments, and even businesses have in how we respond? 

Should the work of mourning ever be commercialised? It’s a question that sits uneasily at the edge of innovation. If companies can build tools that ease grief, when does genuine support tip into something more commercial, is it when the focus shifts from care to profit? 

Some would say that line has already blurred. Health-tech and longevity start-ups attract billions in investment each year, promising to improve how we live, age, and heal. Grief may simply be the next frontier. Others argue that this balance between compassion and commerce is inevitable in a world where, somewhere, all healthcare is business. 

Maybe grief technology isn’t an outlier at all. Weddings, schools, births, even diaries and photographs are all industries built around emotion and memory. Perhaps what unsettles us is not that grief might be commercialised, but that it already is. The challenge, then, is deciding what we’re comfortable selling and what we still believe should remain sacred. 

And perhaps the real question is this: how do we keep compassion at the centre, when even care itself becomes a product?