Both my parents were born in 1940, and both are now deceased. My father died in 2013, my mother died in 2021.

My dad had his own movie and sheet music auction site for many years, but didn’t really write anything personal on it apart from a random joke or pun. My mother had a collection of recipes online on a separate site that my brother set up for her, but she didn’t write anything personal there, either.

Both of them were relatively active on Facebook. That’s where they shared their opinions and photos, that’s where they commented on posts and photos of their friends, just like everyone else at the time.

After my father died, my wife (who was and is very smart about social media in particular) offered to request my dad’s Facebook page to be memorialized. I didn’t really understand the full details of what that meant, but I trusted her that it was the right thing to do. It seemed to take a while, but around 2015 I noticed that it said Remembering above his name. I believe existing friends can write on his wall, but only my niece and myself have posted there. It feels kinda sad writing to an online fragment of someone who I love who has passed.

My wife said the memorialization process has been updated in Facebook. Under Account settings you can choose what happens after you die. You can choose to delete your account after death, or designate a legacy contact to manage your account.

Note that neither choice in the above picture is selected. That’s from my profile. I didn’t realize it was there until I started writing this post. I would assume my mother didn’t select anything, either.

“Delete after death” is pretty self-explanatory. You can also choose a “legacy contact” to manage your account after you have died. It seems like Facebook just gives your list of friends to choose from for this role.

My mother’s Facebook page is not memorialized. I would also assume she did not designate a legacy contact.

Per Facebook help:
If the account holder hasn’t selected a legacy contact, the account won’t be actively cared for by anyone after memorialization has been requested.

So if we request memorialization, it just becomes this thing that we can’t touch or manage, it just sits there, unchangeable in perpetuity.

Since my mother’s account is still technically one of a live person, things that are disabled for a memorialized account — suggesting her as a friend, or birthday reminders to her existing friends — are still active.

If I look at her wall, I can clearly see people that are wishing her a happy birthday as a fond memory of her, but there are definitely a couple people who might have missed the death announcement.

What’s the point of this post? The Internet is this thing that lives and breathes outside of us. What happens when we go? Do we disappear completely? Do remnants of us float around that are tethered to nothing?

The children of a mother can feel very strongly about preserving an online avatar of her. But do her children’s children? Her children’s grandchildren?

If I designate my wife as my legacy contact to manage my memorialized account after I die, and then she eventually dies after me, she can have her designated legacy contact manage her account. What happens to my account? Is there anyone who can manage it?

We are entering into multiple generations of people living with the Internet. Is there a concept of preserving a familial footprint? A legacy for an entire family?

I don’t like to think of my own death. But I’m getting older. My kids are growing up into adults, and my parents are gone. I don’t know that anyone likes to think about death, but I wonder how an understanding and reckoning with death will eventually be incorporated into the Internet, something that we rely on so much during our lives.