We’ve always talked to the dead.
In quiet rooms, at gravesides, in dreams.
But now, they talk back.
They text, post, and “like” things long after they’re gone. Their photos pop up in our “memories.” Their playlists shuffle into our morning commute.
Our dead live inside our devices, and we invited them there.
Technology promised to keep us connected. What it didn’t warn us about was what happens when the connection never ends.
Photo by Firmbee.com on Unsplash
The New Afterlife Is Online
A generation ago, death marked a clear boundary.
Letters stopped coming. Phones went quiet.
You might hold onto a photograph or voicemail, but the world moved on.
Now, the line is blurred.
We’ve built digital afterlives that keep our dead perpetually present, Facebook memorial pages, Instagram archives, AI chatbots trained on old messages, even holograms that deliver eulogies “in person.”
Some of these are acts of love.
Others are experiments in denial.
I’ve seen families message memorial pages daily, updating a parent on new jobs or relationships. I’ve seen people keep the same phone number for years, unable to delete the last text thread. I’ve watched an adult child scroll through their mother’s photos, whispering, “She’s still here.”
She is, and she isn’t.
We’ve entered an era where our grief is mediated by machines.
The Comfort of Connection
It’s easy to understand why we hold on.
Digital traces feel like proof that our loved ones existed, evidence of their laughter, their playlists, their inside jokes. Scrolling through photos can feel like a visit.
Hearing their voice in a saved video can feel like a prayer answered.
Technology gives us access to remembrance in real time.
That accessibility brings comfort, especially in sudden or traumatic loss.
It offers agency in a moment when everything else feels uncontrollable.
And for many people, these connections are healing. They create community around remembrance. They turn solitary grief into collective memory, memorial hashtags, tribute reels, virtual vigils. They keep love visible in a world that moves on too quickly.
But comfort isn’t the same as acceptance.
And not all forms of remembering help us heal.
The Trap of Endless Connection
Grief has a natural rhythm: presence, absence, adaptation.
We love, we lose, we learn to live with absence.
Technology interrupts that rhythm.
Instead of learning to live without, we live around.
The dead remain part of our feeds, our chats, our playlists.
They become interactive archives, always available, never fully gone.
We can text them. We can rewatch their stories. We can even train AI to mimic their voice and language patterns so they “speak” to us again. And somewhere in the middle of that, we stop making room for absence.
We start mistaking data for presence. We mistake algorithms for intimacy. We mistake remembering for connection. There’s a difference between keeping someone’s memory alive and refusing to let them die.
The Rise of Digital Resurrection
In the past five years, entire industries have emerged around “digital immortality.”
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AI voice clones recreate the speech of deceased loved ones.
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Chatbots use text messages and emails to simulate conversation.
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Holographic memorials let people “attend” their own funerals.
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Companies now offer “posthumous messaging services,” sending prewritten texts or emails years after death.
The marketing is seductive: Your loved one’s story lives forever.
But forever is a long time to grieve.
I’ve spoken with people who found comfort in hearing a parent’s AI voice say, “I’m proud of you.” And I’ve spoken with others who described it as shattering, like death happening all over again, but this time scripted.
What happens when our technology starts performing grief instead of helping us live through it?
When we can summon our dead on demand, do we risk turning them into products, versions of themselves edited for our comfort?
We used to build monuments out of stone. Now we build them out of code.
But both ask the same question: what does remembering mean when the person you loved no longer gets to change?
The Funeral Director’s View
As someone who works with death every day, I’ve watched how these new tools can shape mourning.
Families used to bring photographs and song lists to share at services.
Now they bring QR codes that link to tribute websites and livestreams.
They ask for video montages set to Spotify playlists and digital guestbooks that stay open forever.
These are beautiful evolutions of ritual. But they also reveal something deeper: our discomfort with finality.
We don’t like endings anymore. We don’t like to stop talking, stop scrolling, stop connecting.
But death is an ending, and endings are what give life meaning. Without them, our stories have no shape.
Technology, for all its gifts, tempts us to flatten grief into maintenance.
Instead of sitting in absence, we refresh the page. Instead of silence, we post.
Instead of ritual, we react.
Sometimes the most sacred act isn’t about keeping someone present, but rather learning to say goodbye.
The Algorithm of Memory
Social media has no conscience. It doesn’t understand death. It remembers everything.
Which means we can stumble across loss without warning.
A birthday reminder for someone who died.
A “memory” from a day we’d rather forget.
A photo of a smiling friend who’s been gone for years, surfacing between ads for shoes and vacation rentals.
The algorithm doesn’t mean harm; it’s designed to keep us engaged. But in doing so, it hijacks grief’s natural process. It forces us into reliving instead of remembering.
And when mourning becomes constant exposure, it can turn into exhaustion.
Some people start deleting photos just to regain control. Others create private memorial pages to manage what’s public. And some leave everything as it is, hoping the world will treat those pixels gently.
But the truth is, we’ve handed our grief to systems that profit from attention, not healing. And that should make us pause.
Digital Clutter, Emotional Weight
There’s another side to this story, the quiet anxiety of digital estate management.
When someone dies, their online presence doesn’t.
There are passwords, cloud drives, photos, subscriptions, accounts, and backups.
Each login becomes a gate to another layer of their life.
Families spend months trying to access data they didn’t know existed, only to discover more grief inside. Old messages. Hidden folders. Digital diaries no one was meant to read.
We used to sort through closets. Now we sort through inboxes.
Both reveal who someone was, but one never ends.
It raises new ethical questions:
Who owns your memories after you die?
Who decides which parts of you stay online?
Who gets to press delete?
Death used to mean release.
Now, it often means storage.
Between Presence and Absence
Maybe technology isn’t the problem. Maybe it’s how we use it.
Because at its best, digital remembrance can deepen connection.
It can preserve culture, honor ancestors, share stories across time zones and generations. It can democratize mourning, giving space to voices that were once excluded.
But at its worst, it replaces intimacy with simulation. It trades closure for endless access. It makes us spectators to our own grief instead of participants.
We need both presence and absence to heal.
Presence gives us comfort.
Absence gives us growth.
One without the other leaves us stuck in limbo.
Our dead deserve more than to become algorithms.
And we deserve more than to become their curators.
Learning to Let Go (Without Forgetting)
So what do we do?
We start by setting boundaries with our memories.
We decide what stays public, what stays private, and what needs to be let go.
We make peace with deleting as an act of love, not betrayal.
We treat digital space the same way we treat sacred space, with intention.
When we curate memory consciously, we honor both life and death.
We choose meaning over maintenance. We let remembrance breathe instead of keeping it on life support.
Grief doesn’t need to be eternal to be true.
It needs to be honest. And honesty sometimes means saying: I love you enough to stop scrolling.
The Future of Mourning
We are the first generation to live with our dead in our pockets.
The first to grieve through notifications.
The first to discover that the cloud has a memory, and it never forgets.
Future historians will study how we handled this, how we mourned in public, how we archived love, how we digitized loss.
They’ll ask if technology made us more compassionate or more afraid to face reality.
They’ll wonder whether all these connections helped us heal or kept us haunted.
I don’t have the answer.
But I do know this:
Every time we stop and truly feel, away from screens, away from clicks, away from the illusion of control, we meet grief where it lives.
Not in pixels, but in presence.
Not in code, but in care.
That’s where the living and the dead still meet, quietly, honestly, and without an algorithm in sight.
An Invitation
Before you close this page, take a moment.
Think of one person you’ve lost.
Scroll through their photos if you want. Read an old message.
Then put the phone down.
Sit in the quiet. Remember the sound of their laugh, the smell of their shampoo, the warmth of their hug.
That memory doesn’t need Wi-Fi.
That’s the real connection.
That’s what no technology can replace.
Marc D Malamud
Transitioning Doula
