By Dr. Robert Thorson

“A company based in suburban Elk Grove Village, Ill., has accepted its first deposit for manufactured diamonds made from carbon captured during the cremation process so that loved ones — family members, or even pets — could be mounted into a ring, pendant or other jewelry.”

— The Chicago Tribune, Aug. 20

Your cat can be a diamond. So can your late grandmother, the old dog you had to put down, or even the nameless goldfish you discovered floating belly up in the tank. Life Gem will convert their ashes into a gem. The starting price is $4,000 for a quarter- carat version of a loved one.

How nice. Instead of keeping ashes in an urn, one could actually wear the deceased on one’s finger as a beautiful and everlasting reminder. But I love my wife too much for that. I would rather have her come back as a tomato.

Diamond is the hardest of all substances, the epitome of brittleness. When embedded into saw blades and drill bits, it can cut concrete, steel pipes and even the hardest ceramics. Would I want to think of my wife in that way?

Diamond is the loneliest of all substances. Composed of pure carbon and arranged in a tightly packed crystal lattice, it refuses to react chemically with other substances. It won’t tarnish, dissolve, digest or merge with other things, even other gems. It lives inert and alone. Would this be a fitting reminder for the child who died too young?

Diamonds manifest violence, even more so than scalding lava. They crystallize under extremely high pressure and temperature, beyond the continuum of soot and graphite, to become diamonds. Ashes can be coerced to grow in diamond factories, but only after being leached in acids, then melted and crushed in ultra-hot, high-stress vises. The electrical energy and technology to accomplish this is staggering, which accounts for the high cost.

Diamonds are weird. In nature, they form only in the most unusual circumstances, when organic material thrust deep into the dark bowels of our planet is pressed and cooked into the gems we value so highly.

Over millions of years, the carbon (most of which is probably from dead bacteria) first crystallizes into microscopic specks, then enlarges to gemstones big enough to see and wear. Then something unsettling happens. A crack in the earth develops, locally reducing the pressure and allowing the rocks at great depth to melt. This molten rock, called magma, rises rapidly to the surface in a narrow plume, sweeping diamonds up along the way. As they approach the surface, gas within the magma bubbles out, converting the magma to a diamond-studded silicate froth. This accelerates the upward flow, allowing the diamonds to reach the surface before they are changed back into more normal, carbon-bearing minerals.

Diamond mines are essentially vertical shafts that remove the rock from these volcanic throats, knock away the excess froth and collect the gems in the rough. To use an unpleasant analogy, the formation of diamonds is not unlike fast-rising heartburn that culminates with a burp. A puppy reincarnated as a diamond would seem a wretched idea to me.

Diamonds are rare precisely because they are so abnormal. The clarity of the crystal — its “fire,” in the parlance of jewelers — is due to its dense atomic packing, which results from the incredible depths at which diamonds formed (more than a hundred miles straight down). The dense packing also accounts for their heaviness, hardness and resistance to chemical decay. We value diamonds for aesthetic properties produced by their weird place of birth.

Diamonds are the antithesis of life, refusing to participate in the life-giving alchemy of soil despite eons of persuasion. Earth is alive precisely because its elements recycle from one thing to another, using the soil as a medium. Unlike most minerals, diamonds refuse to cooperate with other actors in the theater of soil, namely roots, leaves, microbes, insects, fungi, moisture and those minerals that aren’t quite so tough. Diamonds sit in the soil like marble statues in a theater, unfazed by the challenges and chaos of life. They resemble the most stationary of all stubborn cats.

Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Life is an eternal stream of atoms mingling through earth, sky and all creatures, including us. This is the way the life ought to be.