Their Account Is Still Active

The notification arrives, breezy and well-meaning, from a platform that means nothing by it: It’s their birthday! Help them celebrate. And it is the birthday of someone who is dead, and the platform, which does not know, is inviting you to write on the wall of a person who will not read it, and you sit there holding the phone, caught between the machine’s cheerful ignorance and the enormous fact it is ignorant of, which is that the account is still active and the person is not.

This is one of the strange new territories of grief, and it has arrived so recently that we have no customs for it, no etiquette, no agreed way to behave — the digital afterlife, the account nobody closed, the profile frozen at whatever the person happened to be doing when they stopped. Because a life used to end and, apart from the paperwork, simply cease; the person exited the daily systems of the living. Now they don’t. Now they persist, in a limbo of their own making, a profile suspended mid-sentence, a last post that will forever be the last post, a face in a thousand other people’s feeds, a name the platform keeps helpfully surfacing — you have memories together, you may know this person, wish them a happy birthday — because the platform has no concept of death and no reason to acquire one, and so it keeps the dead in circulation, prompting the living to interact with them, indefinitely, forever.

The wall that became a grave

And here is the thing that has happened, without anyone deciding it should, that I find genuinely moving: the frozen profile has become a grave. An actual one, in function if not in stone — a place people go to talk to the dead.

Look at the wall of almost anyone who has died with an account left open, and you will find it, the slow accretion of the bereaved arriving to speak. On the birthday, on the anniversary, at Christmas, and at random — miss you every day, thinking of you today, can’t believe it’s been a year, saw a heron this morning and thought of you. People post to the dead. Publicly, knowing full well the dead cannot read it, they arrive at the profile and leave their small messages, the way people leave flowers, and they read each other’s, and a comment section becomes, over time, a graveside where a whole scattered community can gather without travelling, can stand at the same digital stone from different cities and lay down the same helpless love — miss you, miss you, miss you — addressed to a person who is not there, in a place that exists nowhere, kept open by a company that does not know it has built a cemetery.

It is a strange grave, and an oddly democratic one. The old graves are geographic; you have to go to them, and most people can’t, most of the time. The frozen profile is a grave anyone can visit from anywhere, at three in the morning, from bed, and so the dead who leave an account open are, in a way the buried never were, reachable — reachable at an address, in a comment box, where love keeps arriving, years on, from people scattered across the world who have nowhere else to bring it. The mother who posts to her dead son every single birthday, publicly, for a decade, is not confused about whether he can read it. She knows. She posts anyway, because it is the last address she has for him, and a letter with nowhere to go is still a letter, and writing it is still a way of loving him, and the platform, blind and eternal, keeps the mailbox open.

The button that is a burial

And then, eventually, someone has to decide what to do with it, and this is the part that has no precedent and no comfort, because it turns out that in the digital afterlife you can be asked to bury someone a second time, administratively, with a button.

The platforms offer it now: memorialize this account. Or delete it. Someone with the authority — a spouse, a parent, a designated heir to a digital estate nobody used to have — is presented with the option to change the status of the dead, to freeze the profile officially into a memorial, or to remove it entirely, to reach in and close the account and end the limbo. And it is a small administrative act, a few clicks, and it is also, unmistakably, a burial — the second one, the digital one, the moment the living choose to stop the platform pretending the dead are alive, to end the birthday reminders, to lay the profile finally to rest. And people find they cannot do it, for years, the same way they cannot delete the text thread or clear the closet, because to memorialize the account is to agree, officially, to a company, that the person is gone, and to leave it active is to keep them, absurdly, technically, among the living, still having birthdays, still turning up in the feed, still an account rather than a grave. So they leave it. The limbo persists because ending it is unbearable, and the platform keeps sending the birthday reminders, and the wall keeps filling with miss you, and the dead go on, suspended, active, forever almost-here.

I have no advice about any of it, because there isn’t any; this is too new, and grief is too particular, and the person who closes the account after a month and the person who leaves it open for a decade are both simply doing the thing their grief requires, and I will not rank them. I only want to name it, because it is one of the genuinely new shapes that loss has taken in our lifetimes and almost nobody talks about it: that the dead now leave an account, and it stays active, and the platform keeps them in circulation, and the comment section becomes a grave, and the living arrive there to speak to people who cannot hear them, and it is foolish, and it is one of the most human things we do, and there is a button, somewhere in the settings, that would end it, and we cannot, most of us, bring ourselves to press it — because as long as the account is still active, some blind eternal machine is treating them as though they might yet log in, and we are not ready, we are never ready, to be the ones who tell it otherwise.