After She Died, My Mom Reminded Me That the Internet Isn’t Forever

It was a sunny Friday afternoon, and I was holding out my phone, voice shaking as I asked my partner to impersonate my dead mom. I had been speaking with Yahoo’s customer service center for over an hour, working through the phone tree again and again. I was almost to the point of breakdown when, on my fourth go-round, a kind voice on another continent suggested I put my mother on the line.

When I was younger, my mom recited a familiar refrain: “Careful what you put online — it’ll come back to haunt you.” I pictured my posts in some nebulous, ghostly limbo, lying dormant until it came time to rise from the grave and keep me from ever finding employment. And to be fair to my mom, it’s certainly not unheard of for people to face consequences as the result of their past actions online.

Born in 1956, having spent most of her life without the irreversible interconnectedness of the internet, I think my mom was simultaneously awestruck and skeptical. As she spoke, I remember feeling that the world she described, with everything cast in a sort of digital amber, appealed to me.

My mom passed away in October of 2019, after decades of fierce love, stellar music taste, soft socks, hard work, nature photography, bad cooking, worse singing, and valiant motherhood. She had an aggressive course of Multiple Sclerosis, a neurodegenerative autoimmune disease that slowly compromised nearly all of the aforementioned in turn. Throughout the last years of her life, lived in multiple apartments, condos, and care facilities. As she moved from place to place, many of her belongings were lost too; every record was precious.

After her death, I unearthed an old notebook of hers. I traced the slight indentations of her print, frowning at how her words smudged beneath my touch. I pulled an old t-shirt of hers over my head, and discovered it had been eaten away by moths. When I ran out of fallible physical talismans, I turned with relief to that indelible archive she had so fervently warned me against — the internet.

For all her concern about the World Wide Web, my mom was sort of enchanted by email. Maybe because she was our town’s postmaster, she enjoyed this comparatively effortless version of what she spent all day facilitating. She helped me set up my first account. I mainly used it to send her emojis and little poems, always eliciting a loving and indulgent reply.

Pulling my ancient password from my cobwebbed mind, I readied myself for the bittersweet experience of reading her words. But when the page loaded, my inbox was empty.

I choked back tears, searched for answers, and turned up this clause, buried in the terms of service provided by Verizon Media (owner of Yahoo): “We may, without notice, temporarily or permanently suspend or cancel your account…if your account shows extended periods of inactivity in accordance with our account deletion policy.”

How extended must these inactive periods be to warrant deletion? It’s as unclear to me now, having asked at least three different customer service representatives, as it was when I first sifted through the terms. Verizon also claims that, “If we permanently suspend or terminate your account, we will notify you in advance and allow you reasonable time to access and save information, files, and content associated with your account.” I never received any such notification — although I suppose it’s possible they notified my inactive account of its own inactivity.

Yahoo Customer service, known as “Yahoo Account Pro” costs £4/month. After searching for every possible alternative to what is surely racketeering, I paid my due. In exchange, I was afforded the privilege of swallowing my increasing hysteria as I stumbled through a maze of automated menus. Eventually I was connected with a warm and distant person, who told me that there was nothing they could do to recover my inbox.

I was gutted. But then I realized — there was still my mom’s email. If anything, her account was more valuable: a snapshot of Debbie Ann Richter-Wallace. It was an incomplete but significant collection of scraps — subscriptions, chain mail, photos she’d felt proud of, conversations with friends, and responses to the ads she posted while trying to sell the increasingly inaccessible two-story home we loved.

I switched tactics, and asked if they could help me create an archive of her account. I didn’t have the password, but I believed I could answer her security questions — her favorite color and singer were easy, and I could never forget her Lhasa Apso’s absurd and delightfully lengthy name. I told them she’d recently died, and I was worried that her inbox would disappear like mine had. They explained that, because she was dead, the only thing they could do was delete her account.

Facebook has had a “memorialize” function since 2015, the latest version of which allows you to convert the page of a deceased loved one into a shrine of sorts. Instagram, owned by Facebook, works in much the same way. At the end of last year, Twitter announced a similar feature, in response to an outcry against the deletion of inactive accounts, many of which belong to dead people. YouTube has an “Inactive Account Manager,” which allows the channel’s owner to designate someone in advance. Because you can schedule videos on YouTube, the site also incidentally allows for posthumous publication of new content. The 2020 death of Nicole Thea, a pregnant twenty-four-year-old YouTube personality highlighted this possibility, when a scheduled video was posted to her channel following her passing. After initial confusion, her family shared that as they mourned her, they would allow the other videos she had queued to be posted as well.

All of these functions attempt to acknowledge — with varying degrees of success — our innate need to both memorialize our loved ones, and hold onto their potentially important information.

Allegedly to serve this purpose, YahooMail was offering for-profit customer service, and the deletion of my mom’s account.

So, I resurrected her. I hung up, called back, and explained to the next representative that my mother was actively dying, and that I was hoping to preserve her inbox before she was gone. I explained that she was in hospice care, at a medical facility that was under lockdown due to the pandemic. It was at this point that I was asked to put the dying woman I had concocted on the phone. I had performed a feat of necromancy, but it still wasn’t enough for them.

In the early, wild days of Web-based email, developers warned explicitly against transmitting sensitive information via this new and unfathomable frontier. Even now, some businesses have employee email systems with automatically expiring inboxes, in order to lessen digital clutter, and avoid security breaches. In 2018, Google unveiled ‘confidential mode,’ which continues this trend by allowing you to send messages that will self-destruct.

On the whole, however, we have moved away from this type of caution with our personal accounts. Especially in the last near-year of social distance, with so many people working and learning remotely, the idea of limiting email to non-essential information is laughable.

At one time, it would have made my mom laugh as well. More recently, however, she’d had less use for email. She had good days, and she had days when she would not eat, or speak, or recognize me standing in front of her. On almost any of these days, she would not have been able to pick up the phone to chat with Yahoo.

But Yahoo didn’t account for that when writing their protocol, so my partner and I tried to strategize. How could a perfectly healthy person of twenty-three do a convincing impression of a sixty-three-year-old at death’s door? Would their rasp be convincing enough for Yahoo? Could they pull off the unique cadence of a toothless woman on heavy-duty painkillers? Should they die mid-call?

Nauseated, I abandoned the plan and hung up the phone once more.

I paged gingerly through my mom’s notebook again. It was from 2000, and she’d been keeping lists of new words I learned. Exactly, Ridiculous, and Bubble Bath were all printed in fading blue ink. And beneath them, a short combination of numbers and letters that felt distantly familiar. It was her password — the one that she, taking a turn to flout my warnings for a change, had used for everything. With even greater care than I’d used before, I set the notebook down next to my keyboard, and logged on.

Now, I log into her email once a week, staving off the specter of inactivity. I feel more cautious toward my accounts than I did before. Many of us, especially young people, have come to view the internet as an extension of ourselves. Our online identities facilitate vital experiences, and the accounts through which we channel ourselves are often hardly distinguishable as conduits. In this sense, my email account is an extension of my own mind. In my mother’s case, that extension was also a portrait of a period mostly lost to time, one that has already become hard to recall.

I believed that what I put on the internet would endure, and I came to think of it as wholly mine. But email is not permanent, and starring a message, or saving it to a folder, does not protect it from being lost to the abyss. All it takes is one move from a massive company to remind us that though our accounts may feel like ours, those words don’t really belong to us.

A version of this piece was originally published with Gizmodo UK.