The Experience of Grief Is Changing
Its common now for people to linger as digital ghosts after they die, transforming the nature of loss. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic , Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here. When my mom makes our family Christmas cookies, she no longer needs a recipe. Instead, we stand side by side in the kitchen while I follow her muscle memory, rolling Russian tea cakes in powdered sugar and pressing the bottoms of forks into the dough balls for chocolate crinkle cookies. But my mom is Type A to a t : Shes scanned the pages of step-by-step instructions and keeps them organized on her Google Drive, just in case. And shes already made sure that, when she dieswhenever that awful day might comethe folder containing all of these recipes will get sent directly to me. Technically, the cookie recipes will be part of a larger posthumous digital delivery, arriving in my inbox courtesy of Googles Inactive Account Manager. They will reach me three months after my moms departurea time frame she selected after doing a regular review of her privacy settings earlier this year (like I said, Type A). With the cookie recipes will come the rest of her Google Drive, containing information including a list of account passwords, and all of her emails. This means there will be a December day when, instead of standing in the kitchen with my mom, Ill be standing with her digital ghost. Ill have mourned her physical passing, but will still be able to summon a part of her via my phone, propped up against the flour with one of many smudged and annotated recipe scans on display. On this day, I expect I will grieve again. As the author Marisa Renee Lee noted in this magazine last year, Grief is the repeated experience of learning to live after loss. Today, with our ever-expanding digital and technological reach, loved ones left behind must encounter more reminders of that loss than ever before. Memory endures through the email accounts still collecting marketing messages, the Facebook arguments frozen in time, the iPad that continues to uselessly ping about an overdue library book. Left unattended, these digital assets float aimlessly in the internets ether. To have control over them presents the inheritor with a challenging personal quandary: Do they take advantage of the weird comfort these digital remains can provide, sinking into an in-between world where the person who died still feels alive, in small pixelated ways? Or do they shut it all down and accept a second death? Estate lawyers have long encouraged clients to account for their digital property, but no one has come up with an emotional road map for the burden of inheriting these things. Some logistical matters will only reveal themselves when its too late, forcing widows like Ashley Reese to take their grief to the Apple store. I had a weird breakdown, Reese told me. Her husband, Robert Stengel, died from peritoneal mesothelioma in December at the age of 34. He left behind a comprehensive list of accounts and passwords, and among the things Reese inherited were his AirPods. It was seven months before she felt ready to resurrect his Apple Watch, which she brought to the Apple store for troubleshooting. An employee told her she was wearing it wrong. I couldnt do it, she recalled. Im just like, Im sorry, this is not mine; its my dead husbands. Read: There are no five stages of grief More so than ever before, it is possible for someone to live on through these digital shadows. In addition to holding on to his AirPods and Apple Watch, Reese still keeps her iMessage conversation with Stengel pinned to the top of the Messages appshe once accidentally sent him a text, and tried to unsend it when she realized. When she wants to watch something on Hulu, she can still select his profile. When she opens up YouTube, the algorithm still recommends Succession recaps or fight-scene compilation videos, the things Stengel would be watching if he were alive. When shes really missing him, shell open up his camera roll, and look at one of the last pictures he tooka photo of Reese in his hospital room, unaware that she was being snapped. This is just psychic damage every day, she said. Lingering in someones posthumous digital presence can be as painful as it is comforting, and comes with unexpected revelations. You dont want to read too much, Marie, a woman whose mother died from ovarian cancer last fall, told me. (Marie asked to withhold her last name in order to speak about her family.) Her mom was proactive about her end-of-life plans, going so far as to order her own headstone before she died. She left Marie with her phone, and a list of passwords for all of her accounts. Looking through the device in the days after her mothers death, Marie found a text thread where her mom had been venting to a friend about a fight theyd had. Marie discovered a Twitter account that her mom had apparently used to spar with right-wingers onlineMarie had always thought her mother was as conservative as these opponents. Her Spotify was also revealing: She listened to so much Taylor Swift, and I had no idea she liked Taylor Swift. Family and friends, themselves grieving, will send text messages to Maries mothers phone. They say they miss her, hoping the sentiment somehow reaches her in the great beyond. Marie reads them. Its a nice reminder that she was important to people, she told me. To know her mother lives on in the thoughts and memories of others is a comfort, one she can now easily access through a screen. Technology like this, which can document a previously intangible part of a persons legacy, is a gift. Its also extremely fragile. Websites shut down, accounts get hacked, devices break. Its not safe to assume that direct-message conversations and other social-media memories will be there forever. My current plan is to just try to do as many digital copies of things as possible, Reese told me. She has 10 years worth of messages with Stengel, and plans to back them up on her computer, in Google Drive, and to her iCloud. I would be absolutely devastated if I lost that stuff. Read: What losing two children taught me about grief At the same time, these digital spaces can help combat another inevitability: that, as the months go by, Reese will start to forget. I have this compulsion now where if I have any thought about Rob or any memory, Ill immediately open my Notes app and write it down, she said, to remind myself of who I was and who he was, and make sure all those [memories] are intact. Its tempting not to think about death, choosing instead to be walloped by griefs right hook one day out of nowhere. Even when my mom let me know about the plans for her Google account, fearing Id receive an email notification and panic, she didnt use the word dead . We both knew what she meant, though, and now that I know what awaits me, the records of our digital interactions have more meaning. The Wordle scores texted back and forth, the DMs about our favorite Instagram-famous dog, even the hokey e-cards we still send each other on holidaysthese things no longer feel like just more clutter in a digital abyss. Someday, theyll be the only things that are left.