my digital immortality

does this calm you? not if you have allergies

If you could write one last email that would be released after your death, what would you say?  What would it say about you?  This was the question I was asking myself while starring at the blank text box on the website deathswitch.com.

About a year ago while listening to an episode of Radiolab on NPR I heard about a website named deathswitch.  The creator was a neuroscientist, David Eagleman.  My first experience with him came in the form of something much less scientific.  Sum: Forty tales from the afterlives, was a collection of short fiction.  The book is exactly as titled, forty different stories about possible afterlives, some funny, some sad, some thought provoking, and some down right creepy.  While the afterlife is not exactly a scientific study, many of the stories rely heavily on Eagleman’s research as a neuroscientist.  It was one of the best books I’d read in a very long time and I cannot recommend it strongly enough.

Deathswitch as he described it, was a kind of digital immortality where you never truly die because through their system of email releases written by you, your digital form will continue exist.

In my continuing quest to experience more in real life and in my cyber life I decided to join deathswitch.com and reflect on the feeling of knowing that I was now digitally immortal.

So what is deathswitch?  Put simply it is a website that allows you to store encrypted emails that would be dispatched at the time of your death.  The trigger for determining this is by a non response to a “prompt” which is sent to your email address at predetermined intervals.  The information contained in the message is entirely up to you.  Their suggestions are: bank account numbers, passwords, unspoken secrets, final words, or the last line of an argument.

I have spent my whole life dealing with and trying to accept my own mortality.  All the plays and stories I have ever written deal almost exclusively with death or afterlives and fictional versions of myself dealing with them.  How it is that some people find themselves able to accept without fear their mortality has always been a mystery to me.  I wish that I could feel the same way because then perhaps I could occupy my time with experiences other than my eventual death, perhaps enjoy life more, or even find pleasure in daredevil activities.  Joining this website was a direct acknowledgement of the fact that I will eventually die and the words that I write in the message would be the last that anyone would ever read.

When I mentioned this to Jaime she asked me not to join, claiming that I was inviting death by doing so.  If I am afraid of death than Jaime is mortified (no pun intended) by it.  For her just to even think about the idea of a website like this was upsetting.  I was finding my experience therapeutic, looking right into the face of death, in a way.  I also found the exercise of writing my final words to be intriguing.

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The first image you find on the website is of a field full of golden sun flowers, I took special note of the image because an open field of flowers so often in popular culture is representative of the afterlife.  The other image you find is of a grass covered hillside with a trio of trees  looking out over clouds and more grassy hills.  There are no people, animals, or technology present, only nature.  It could lead one to believe (including me) that the afterlife is a lonely but beautiful and calming place.

I proceeded to sign up using the normal method of email, password, etc.  I was then asked if I would like a basic or premium account.  The premium offers you the opportunity to create multiple messages to send to various email addresses at a cost of $19.95 per year.  I had no need for the premium account but could understand why someone would want one.  I ended up going with the basic account that allows one message to a single recipient.

Once logged in you need to create a schedule for how often Deathswitch will “prompt” you in an email to determine that you are still among the living.  I chose the default; every 15 days with 5 days to respond.  If you do not respond to their prompt your account will go into “worry mode” which is a cute motherly term for the site re-prompting you to respond.  I set my worry mode to re-prompt me 10 times separated by 1 day.  Should I fail to respond my deathswitch will be activated and my final message will be dispatched.  There is also a “vacation” setting which allows you to ignore the prompts for a time without placing deathswitch into worry mode.

I was beginning to imagine that deathswitch was a series of physical beings.  That it was a real person on the other end of the internet connection, one who was assigned to me alone, who would send out those prompts and check in on me.  I imagined that they would honestly worry about my well being and try with all the means necessary to them to find me.  When I didn’t respond they would sit anxiously by the computer waiting for me to reach back and assure them that I was okay.  When it was clear that I was gone they would pause and reflect on my life though they hardly knew it.  Then with all the gravity the action deserved they would send out my message and move on, occasionally on lonely night remembering what it had been like being the caretaker of my last thoughts.

I knew this wasn’t the case, it was just an emotionless computer with built in triggers that we simulated to care about me.  When my deathswitch message was finally sent it would be done immediately and without feeling.

There were only two steps left before the process was complete, to decide who my deathswitch message would be sent to and what exactly that message would contain.  Who it would be going to was easy, Jaime would be my intended recipient, though I imagine she would eventually share it with my family, I wanted her to see it first.  As for the message, I had no idea what to write.

I have no important passwords or account numbers, no unspoken secrets, and at least as of this moment I have no last lines of an ongoing argument.

The text box sat there empty and white waiting patiently for me to fill it with some kind of thoughtful long lasting wisdom.  What would the words I chose to use say about me?  If they were too funny, would it seem that I didn’t understand the gravity of the situation and was inconsiderate of the readers feelings?  If they were too serious would my final words be dishonest, since I am a man who often prefers to make light of dark situations?  This was a rare opportunity to design the last words that anyone will ever read by you and the pressure to make them count was great.

I let that message box sit empty for nearly a week, straining to think about what should fill it before I understood what was causing me to have such difficulty.

While joining deathswitch was a direct acknowledgement of my mortality, I was not looking death in the face.  I feel perfectly healthy and expect to live a long full life, trying to boil my everything down into a simply message box is almost hopeless to do right now.  I imagined that I would need to be writing this from my death bed or having just experienced a near death situation.

My original intention was to blog about the experience of joining the website and then present my final message to you.  Once that message was written I realized that to publish it here for everyone to see would diminish the quality of its impact completely.  It would become just another thing I wrote in my life and was simply forgotten until my death.  So I will not be presenting it here for all to read, I will say that the message is simply an extension of my life as it currently is without fear or sadness, it doesn’t tell a sob story about my life or death.  Instead it reaches out to you after my physical body has become ashes and says simply,

“I’m not gone, I’m still here.  Not visible, but here.”