Susanna and Dain Guttenbeil are a husband-and-wife team looking to change the way Māori and Pasifika people think about death: through “lifestones” instead of gravestones.
Susanna (Samoan/Niuean) and Dain (Māori/Tongan) run headstone makers LifeStone, and say their stones are 100 per cent hand-crafted using only natural materials. They invite customers to decide what their loved one’s memorial plaque can be made of.
Susanna (Auala/Hakupu) says it started when she purchased a gravestone for her deceased father.
She was shocked to hear from the company that more than 97 per cent of headstones in Aotearoa are shipped in from overseas, from countries such as India and China, with some coming from as far as Norway.
“I come from a family of service. My dad was a pastor and my mum was too.
“You live and breathe in the space for your people, why would you go and get a taonga from another country to lie where you are buried? We went down this journey of “stuff that”, we are just going to make our own,” Susanna said.
Susanna and her late father, Reverend Lagaua Talagi.
The idea caught the attention of the public and saw one of their first “lifestones” made for the passing of Herbs band member Thom Nepia.
A key to what sets them apart from many others in their business is their grave markers come digitally powered.
This means they have a barcode on the stone that people can scan on their phone via their Lifestone app to watch memories of buried loved ones.
The technology was developed when Dain’s brother became terminally ill and wanted something to hold memories for his children.
From there, Dain (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Wai/Vava’u) invested time and money and called it The Life Legacy Code.
“We’ve had 800 exclusively - almost all being Māori and Pacific people who have felt that they could use this technology. That to me now means that we’ve proven it works if it’s done right.
“Having gone through extra steps, which cost a fortune, it would have been way easier to use a QR code. But we developed our own mechanism, our own scanning technology, and it was the right thing to do,” Dain says.
Waikumete Cemetery in West Auckland is home to 70,000-plus graves and recently made it known that there are only eight plots left.
Susan and Dain are in the process of building grave markers that can hold multiple lots of ashes, with their Life legacy Code attached for whānau who wish to choose cremation as an option.
Dain says a headstone like this could extend the use of Waikumete Cemetery for another 200 years because it would be spaces needed for just headstones.
“One of those questions and challenges that we have now is our own culture, is how do we move to a more sustainable practice, where we don’t put the pressure on our mokopuna to have to find more land for the dead, instead of supporting the living,” he says.
Dain operates the business full time, with Susanna taking up a full-time role at Pacific Media Network to help fund the business and provide for their family.
