10/18/2023
“Hey, honey, It’s Mom. Your brother came by and he seemed a little blue. I’m feeling Ok. I was calling to see how you were doing, and how the weather at the campground is. I know you are having a great time. I love you. Talk to you later. Bye.”
The above isn’t the last message my mother ever left me, but it is one of many that I still play to hear her voice. I can see her sitting in her small apartment, afternoon sun pouring in the kitchen window and illuminating the dust motes near the fridge. The coffeepot has one half cup still waiting for her to pour, and she will. A small easel is set up on her tiny kitchen table, her acrylics and palette gathered nearby. Cat Stevens, Carole King, or Deep Forest would be playing on her little CD boombox I found at Goodwill for her, and her little dog would be snoozing under a blanket at the foot of her bed.
Other messages have more urgency, or a touch of frustration. In at least one of them prior to 2015, her speech is slurred and her words jumbled. After her hip-cracking fall that year, though, when the doctors reworked her medicines and she was no longer numbing herself with daily Va**um and Oxy, her messages were always clear and usually bright and cheery, even though she suffered from mild depression.
All of her messages begin with “Hey, honey. It’s Mom.” As if I’d ever forget her voice, or mistake it for someone else’s after 53 years hearing it. Impossible.
None of these messages, many of which I know by heart, will ever change. They are set in stone; rather, they are set in unalterable bytes of data on my phone. Listening to them provides a specific source of comfort for me when I am missing her fiercely, which ebbs and flows erratically now that she has been dead for just over four years.
None of the photographs I have of her will change, either—not the ones on my phone and computer, and especially not the ones I can hold in my hand. I can open cards she wrote in her beautiful handwriting, flip through pictures she drew for me, hold in my hand the unique hand-thrown pottery pieces she lovingly sculpted, and admire paintings she created for me as often as I wish, and they will always remain static. The bracelet I wear with a small amount of her ashes in it will always contain those same ashes, and they will never reorder themselves back together into a fleshly vestige of her. I know full well that I will never receive another email or text message from her, not from any address or phone number.
In the weeks and months following her death, the knowledge of this last sentence wrecked me emotionally. Now, I have come to terms with it and I understand that it is the natural order; it makes what she did leave for me all the more precious.
This immutable quality is a large part of why these mementos are so comforting. I cannot even imagine how jarring it would be to open a photo album and see that the images had become something else, or click “play” on a voicemail and hear different words—especially words that would have been strung together after her death. If my mailbox were to ping me and I were to see my mother’s name on a fresh email, I’d immediately suspect fraud, or some kind of joke.
In my messages, texts, and photos, she is still alive and thriving. Being an introverted, thoughtful soul, she was well aware that she would die, and we had discussed it quite a bit. But we always did so with the knowledge that the mementos I would cherish after her death would all be the ones we were making before that time came. How could it be any other way?
Technology makes leaps and bounds seemingly by the minute, though, and it is now possible to memorialize your loved ones in ways that can actually change after they die. From 3-D holograms to AI-generated videos, companies are producing content from the digital archives of people who have passed and whose loved ones want to interact with them again, somehow. Photographs, voice snippets, and video files can be mined to create new messages that allow us to hear from our dearly departed. Our digital lives create a breadcrumb trail that is difficult to erase, even after we die. And someone was bound to capitalize on this.
Grief is a universal human emotion that we will all experience in some form during our lives when we lose someone or something we hold very dear to us. We are a social species, so the bonds we develop with other humans, animals, our homes, the natural world, and even our careers are precious to us. When they are severed, we feel what often amounts to immense emotional pain. This pain can take months or years to subside to tolerable levels, and research overwhelmingly shows that dealing with this grief in healthy (1) ways (as opposed to pretending it doesn’t exist, or trying to avoid feeling it by ingesting mind-altering substances such as drugs or alcohol) is how we eventually are able to tolerate it.
You might think that receiving a text message or an email sent by the deceased on a special anniversary, or having the ability to engage with a hologram of them, or hearing a recording in their voice where they are telling you things you never knew about them would be helpful in the grief process. Indeed, as a short-term measure during the first few weeks when the pain seems unbearable and all we want is one more day, or even one more hour with them, it might be—if used correctly.
But what it can also do is make our grieving worse by prolonging it indefinitely. You could pay a company to send you a recording or video of your loved one, created after their death, cheering you up or congratulating you, for instance. You could have these sent at will, or at set-up special times; they would use AI to create realistic voice memos or videos that did not exist previously. You could even have your dead father “read” a story to your child he never met, or tell stories in his own voice about his childhood, or yours. What’s the harm in that?
There may be none, especially for the last 2 examples. But the other examples raise questions not only about privacy concerns, but about prolonging our grief exponentially. Your “dad” sends sweet texts or emails, but you are just a passive observer in the exchange. You cannot tell him how loved he was, or say you are sorry for how you behaved. You cannot show him how his grandson favors him. You cannot ask his forgiveness, or grant forgiveness he can acknowledge. Will the inability of these “innocuous” messages to change what happened before or at his death be a blessing, or a curse?
If the point is to hold onto your loved one for a bit longer, is that really what’s happening here? Those messages and videos are not your loved one—they are simulations of him or her, simulations created from digital data and manipulated to mimic the person. What are you actually clinging to?
Add to that the possibility of learning things you didn’t know about your loved one because his or her digital life has been plumbed, and you might spend the rest of your life with questions that will never supply you with answers. Experts agree that ruminating over the “what ifs” is not a healthy way to engage with the memories of a loved one, and in this scenario, you will not only be questioning the new information you are receiving, but you will likely begin to question your own memories about the person who died, searching for clues. This creates a loop that is very difficult to escape and can open wounds that never truly heal. Learning new, potentially unpleasant information about a departed loved one can be extremely disconcerting, and can taint your memories of that person for the rest of your life. And yes, you may learn something new that is helpful or surprising in a beautiful way, but the majority of things people “take to their graves” are things of which they are ashamed, not proud—or things they wanted to shield their children from. Sunlight is indeed a helpful disinfectant, but survivors can be irreparably harmed by some information that was never meant to be shared.(2) Caveat emptor.
It is said that one never “gets over” their biggest losses—they just learn how to live with them. Grief is a huge “bubble in a box” at first, and since it is the largest thing in our world right after a loss, it seems to bump us thousands of times a day, breaking us open again and again. Over time, though, as we continue to move about in the world as we must, the bubble doesn’t necessarily get smaller. Instead, the box “grows around” the grief and increases in size, and the bubble doesn’t bump into us as often. I think this is a very helpful way of perceiving grief.
Having varying digital interactions with our lost loved one could damage our ability to let go. Our brains are wired to hunger for novelty, and our attention spans are shrinking precariously—this is one reason why scrolling social media is so addictive. Technology that exploits this could hinder how large our box can grow, and therefore can keep the grief fresher—and potentially unending.
Everyone is an individual, and everyone will grieve differently, of course. But having static photos, texts, voice messages, emails, and letters allows us to remember our loved one—the good and the bad. (3) Our repeated interactions with these unchanging stories, photos, and messages can enable us to let go of the strongest pain bit by bit, on our own terms and at our own pace. We will always retain the mementos, and the memories, as long as we wish to, but the sharpness of the loss will diminish over time.
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(1) Healthy ways of dealing with grief include performing rituals (such as a funeral or memorial) that enable us to “say goodbye” to our loved one; talking about the person or pet who is gone with friends and family who will listen and “show up” for us; writing/journaling (or otherwise creating) about it; engaging in some healthful activities like physical exercise and gratitude endeavors; and focusing on our regular routines, including caring for our children, spouses, pets, and others. Spending quality time with those we love who also knew and loved the deceased, telling stories and reminiscing, can be very cathartic.
The phrase “Saying goodbye” as I have used it above simply denotes our need to say goodbye to the ways we interacted with the deceased while they were alive. That is no longer possible. So we must learn new ways of interacting with our world, which is now a world without them. It’s not necessary to sever all memories of them, or to dispose of their belongings right away. Everyone is different, and we need to find a way that works for us, but the experts agree that a “letting go” is happening on some level.
(2) In the first comment is a link to a long article (as if what I just wrote wasn’t long enough) about some of the dangers of our digital footprint in the world after our death; it sparked me to write this post and it’s a valuable read in its own right. It tells a story about this very thing.
(3) Reminiscing with others about the person is not completely static, because new stories will often come out when the participants change, but the stories themselves and how our lost loved one figured into them, will not. And no one will be making any new stories with the person who has passed—ever.
