The Ghost In My Machines
My brother died eight years ago. Here is an audit of his digital footprint.
Every so often, I log into an old email account. It’s a Yahoo, and I created it in 2001. I became a late-adopter Gmail person in 2009, but kept the other one because when the grief washes over you, it can be nice to read old emails.
Over the course of a decade, my big brother and I traded astonishingly boring notes. Most were very short, tapped into our Blackberries, because this was when people wrote emails, not texts, to stay connected. There are emails scheduling phone calls or planning visits. There’s the one from him containing only lyrics to a DMX banger (subject line: Poetry). There are inside jokes, more than I can count, some with his best friend copied, some, later, with his wife and her sister. They still make me laugh, even though I sometimes struggle to recall the context.
There are also matter-of-fact updates: about traveling from Toronto to Philadelphia for a clinical trial, about brain stem radiation, and oral chemotherapy agents, and the overwhelming exhaustion wrought by a vicious cancer working its way from his adrenal glands to the rest of his shrinking body.
I have heard people say that digital spelunking can make a dead person feel less dead. I do not feel this way. Instead, I…
