The Login You Kept

It happens by inertia, not decision. Their laptop, or their tablet, or the family device they used, is still signed in to everything — the email, the shopping, the streaming, the whole apparatus of a life’s accounts — because nobody ever logs out of anything anymore, and so when they die the sessions simply stay open, warm, active, exactly as they left them. And you find, in the weeks after, that you can move through all of it, as them. You can open their email and read what comes in. You can see their orders, their subscriptions, their saved cards. You can watch their streaming under their name. You did not break in; there was no password to crack; you simply never logged out, and now you drift through a dead person’s entire digital life on the credentials they left standing, wearing their online self like a borrowed coat you are not sure you are allowed to keep and cannot bring yourself to take off.

At first it is practical, and you tell yourself it is only practical. Things have to be closed, cancelled, dealt with — the subscriptions stopped, the bills found, the accounts wound down — and being logged in as them is how you do it, the only way in, and so you go through their email doing the grim administration of a death from inside the very identity that died. But somewhere in the doing, it stops being only practical, and you notice you are lingering. You are reading emails that don’t need reading. You are looking at their order history not to cancel anything but because it is them, the small record of what they bought and wanted. You are letting the streaming keep playing under their profile because it still greets you with their name. You have slipped, without deciding to, from settling their affairs into inhabiting their self, and you are not entirely sure when it happened or whether you want it to stop.

Wearing their skin

The strangest part is how the systems treat you. Because to every algorithm on the other side of that login, you are them. The email addresses you by their name. The shopping site says welcome back and shows you the things they were looking at, recommends more of what they liked, remembers the size they wore. The streaming service, thinking you are them, keeps learning their taste, feeding their profile, building out the portrait of a person by watching what gets watched — not knowing the watcher changed, not knowing the original is gone. You are moving through a world of machines all of which believe you are a person who no longer exists, all of them cheerfully maintaining the fiction, addressing you by a dead name, offering you a dead person’s future purchases, and there is a vertigo in it that has no precedent: to be received, everywhere you go online, as someone you are only impersonating, someone you are grieving, someone whose skin you are wearing to get the practical things done and staying inside a little longer than the practical things require.

And now and then the fiction asks you to affirm it. A prompt comes up — Is this you? Confirm your identity. Welcome back, [their name] — continue? — and there is a button, and the button says yes, and you click it. You click yes, this is me. And it is a lie, a small flat administrative lie you tell a machine, and it is also something more complicated than a lie, because in clicking it you are keeping their account alive, keeping the session warm, keeping the self from being flagged as abandoned, and part of you clicks yes not because the machine requires it but because clicking no — no, this is not me, this person is gone — is a sentence you are not ready to say to anything, not even a login screen. So you click yes, this is me, and become them one more time, and the account continues, and the fiction holds, maintained by your small daily willingness to be mistaken for the dead.

The caretaker of a self

What you have become, without any word for it, is a caretaker — the keeper of a self that is not yours, tending a digital person the way one tends a grave or a garden, keeping it from going to seed. Because the accounts, left alone, would eventually die their own death: flagged, deactivated, purged for inactivity, the streaming forgetting the taste, the email bouncing, the whole online self dissolving for lack of a living hand. And staying logged in prevents that. Your presence keeps their presence. As long as you are moving through the accounts — reading the email, letting the profile play, clicking yes, this is me — the person remains, technically, active, a self still being lived, even if the one living it is you, on their behalf, in their name, keeping the lights on in a house whose owner is gone.

There comes a point where you have to decide whether to keep doing it, and that point is its own quiet grief, and I will not pretend it resolves cleanly. Eventually the practical reasons run out — everything is cancelled, everything is settled — and what remains is only the inhabiting, the lingering, the clicking of yes, and you have to ask yourself how long you are going to go on being them, how long you are going to keep the borrowed coat. Some people log out, one account at a time, deliberately, a slow closing-down that is its own kind of burial — signing out of a dead person’s life for the last time, watching the welcome back disappear, letting the self finally go dark. And some people never do, and keep the sessions open for years, drifting back in on the bad nights to read the old email and let the profile greet them by the vanished name — not to do anything, just to be, for a little while, received by the machines as the person they lost, welcomed back, recognized, still expected. I don’t know which is right, and I don’t think there is a right; there is only how long you can bear to keep being them, and how much worse it feels to stop. But I’d want you to know, before you find yourself doing it, that this is one of the things grief now includes: the login you kept, the self you tend, and the small daily yes, this is me you tell a machine, meaning something no machine will ever understand, which is not yet, not yet, let me be them a little longer.