It’s not easy to talk about mortality. Aside from being born, dying is the one guarantee every single person has in life. It’s a pretty abstract concept most of the time: we’re here now, but one day, we won’t be. Sometimes we may think of it in terms of simply being left alone, out of contact with our friends and family, but at some point I think we realize that it’s more then that. We’re not the ones who are left alone; we’re the ones who do the leaving. If we’re lucky, we get advanced warning after many, many decades of life, and can depart after having put our affairs in order. If we’re unlucky, we have to leave at the worst possible time, not only leaving people behind, bewildered and lost, but also a lot of lingering presence that continues on without us.
Last year, we lost a friend on Black Friday. He had to go in to work that day, and left early on a chilly and icy morning. He was killed in a head-on collision with another driver who was determined to have had fallen asleep at the wheel (I suspect that he had been out for the Black Friday sales that morning, and was returning home). He left behind a wife and two young children.
What he also left behind is a presence. He was a technical support specialist by day, gamer by night, and like many of us who work in technical fields and spend a lot of free time online, he left a decent sized footprint. I received an email today from LinkedIn with their occasional “maybe you know these people?” opportunity to grow my own professional network, and my friend was listed there, with his company name and his position. I fired up Steam last year, shortly after the accident, and remember seeing his name and icon in my friend’s list. Same with Raptr. He had a local account on my Xbox. When I returned to City of Heroes a few weeks ago, I started right next to a holographic projection of his character in the Architect (the last time we played CoH, we had all played a mission arc that he had spent weeks creating). Last night I was working on my daughter’s computer and I saw an installation of Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator that had been installed on 11/1/2010, the night we had all gathered in my basement to try it out, and which we recorded to get a free copy of the game. He’s in that video, forever on YouTube.
I know I’ve signed up for hundreds if not thousands of accounts all across the internet in all of the years I’ve been using it. I get emails for products and services I don’t ever remember having signed up for until I examine them more closely, but I’d be damned if I remember my registration information, or even the reason. I have subscriptions and accounts for active outlets like online games or services. I’ve got payment information at major online retailers. They all fill my inbox from time to time with deals, reminders, or automated birthday wishes. Of course, I’m also active on several social networks, and inactive on several more. Most of these are out of sight, out of mind, and if I were to pass on tomorrow, these services would continue on auto-pilot, sending me emails, showing my status – such as it is – to my friends and family as if I were only AFK for a little while.
I try to be cognoscente of this, and keep whatever account information I have in a central location in case my wife needs to access it to cancel accounts and to notify interested parties. Generation X is the first generation to really have to deal with this kind of post-life issue, and we, our younger generations, and even some generations that precede us now not only have to deal with the traditional end of life activities like life insurance and funeral services, but also to ensure that our spouses or significant others aren’t being nickeled and dimed by online subscriptions that they don’t know how to cancel.
I certainly don’t mind happening upon these shadows of my friend, although it makes me painfully aware that they’re dormant and coldly automated, and will continue to be so for as long as the services are in operation. I also feel a pang of regret when I make the decision to remove an association with him that’s under my control, like the Xbox account or the Steam association. I feel that it’s necessary but also cruel to cut these ties that served us all so well in the past. But I know that I’d want my loose ends to be tied up should I unexpectedly depart, and certainly wouldn’t begrudge anyone I know from doing to the same to me.
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