Grandpa Will,
It’s been a few weeks since you passed away. Whilst we’re all still in shock, at least we know you died how you lived: dancing the night away at “Sydney Mardi Gras 2096” surrounded by hunky firefighters.
You were always diligent and set up an easy-to-follow will. In my modern history class, they played these videos you called “TV shows”, and when people died in your day you’d have to spend months, if not years, sorting through all of their possessions. In some ways it’s easier to keep track of who you were, since you were the first generation to live nearly your whole life online. But grandpa, you were also a “Maximalist” (as you called your Pinterest board) and had a brief “Cottagecore” phase (this was another Pinterest board), and now the other grandkids have gotta go through all your physical things too.
You always told us that when you died, you hoped there’d be enough parts of you scattered around the digital world that you might be able to always hang around. Going through your things, I can see why. There are traces of you all over the internet: social profiles, documents on your laptop, articles in your old uni magazine.
Seeing it all does feel a little bit like I’m in your head. I’m listening to your Spotify Wrapped 2041 while going through your laptop. I can see your old high school assignments; I can hear you in the stories you wrote when you were younger. There are photos of you from nearly every day of your life: I can track the changes in your voice, your facial hair, the jokes you liked, all the people you hung out with at any one point in time.
I do appreciate that you kept things organised in very distinct folders. I will say, however, that you really should’ve cleared your hologram history: I did not need to see a 3D rendering of ageing actor Tom Holland in such vivid detail.
The thing that sticks out to me the most, though, is all the videos of all the concerts you went to. You loved music. You always said music could be exactly what you felt or exactly what you wanted to feel. You had a song for every stage of your life. In every video I can hear you singing.
Nowadays this would all be archival footage, and maybe you filmed it so that one day, someone could watch it and feel like they were in the room too.
But grandpa, I hope when you were taking all these photos and videos and writing all of these memories down in your notes app, you were experiencing them too. I hope, wherever you are, you get to feel the waves of passion and pleasure and momentous bliss that you felt in the moment.
I’m gonna sit here for a few more hours and peel through all of your accounts and electronic footsteps, typing in the same password at every site because it was “just easier”, and then eventually I’ll press the delete button to make sure the digital world doesn’t get too bloated (a new and very necessary government initiative). It’s gonna go through all your subscriptions that you don’t need to pay for anymore, your history, your cookies, and it’s gonna take all your profiles and consolidate them into an “in memoriam” package for us and us alone to have.
We’ll still have all your physical things, but you were your phone, you were your laptop and your texts and the photos you took, as much as you were the clothes you wore and the books you kept. It’s a part of you that we’ll also have to grieve.
But you’re also there in the way I talk, in the hair you passed down to me from your mother, and the strength you blessed me with from your father.
I want you to know I see all the digital marks you left behind, the electronic milieu of your life, but nothing is as potent or important as the time I actually got to spend with you. Those are the things I’ll remember you by.
