The Voicemail I'll Never Delete
Their voice is on that recording. Their actual voice, saying their actual name, sounding exactly like themselves — alive, casual, maybe a little annoyed at having to record a voicemail greeting. It's fifteen seconds long and it's one of the most valuable things I own.
I call it sometimes. Not because I've forgotten. Not because I'm confused. I call it because I need to hear them. Because the human brain starts to forget the exact sound of a voice faster than you'd think, and that terrifies me more than almost anything else about grief. The face I have in photographs. The handwriting I have on birthday cards. But the voice — the specific pitch, the way they said my name, the little laugh before they'd say something sarcastic — that lives on a phone plan I will pay for indefinitely.
If someone tells you this is unhealthy, they can go straight to hell. There's nothing unhealthy about wanting to hear your dead person's voice. There's nothing "stuck" about it. It's love with nowhere to go, and it found the only remaining door.
The Text Thread I Can't Scroll Past
Their texts are still on my phone. The last one is something mundane — a grocery list question, or a "running late," or a dumb meme they sent at 11 p.m. It's the most ordinary, unremarkable message, and it's sacred now. Because they were alive when they sent it. Their thumbs were moving on a screen. They were thinking about me, or at least thinking about groceries, and they were alive.
I haven't opened the thread in a while because I'm terrified of accidentally deleting something. I've screenshotted the important ones. I've backed them up to the cloud, to a hard drive, to my email. I have redundancies for my redundancies because technology fails and I cannot lose these words.
Some people scroll back to the beginning of their text history with the person and read the whole thing. Some people can't bring themselves to look at all. Both are fine. There's no right way to handle a digital archive of someone who no longer exists. Just don't let anyone tell you to delete it to "move forward." Forward doesn't require erasure.
Their Social Media Is a Museum Now
Their Facebook profile is still up. Their Instagram still has posts. Their Twitter — or whatever it's called this week — still has their terrible takes and their funny observations and a selfie from a day they were alive and happy and had no idea what was coming.
Some platforms let you memorialize an account, which basically puts it in a glass case — no one can log in, but the content stays. Some platforms will delete accounts entirely if someone provides a death certificate, which is a sentence that shouldn't exist but does. If you want to preserve their online presence, figure out the options before someone else makes that decision for you.
I find myself visiting their profiles sometimes. Not in a morbid way. In the same way you'd visit a grave, except this grave has their sense of humor and their vacation photos and a post from 2019 where they were complaining about a restaurant. It's them, preserved in digital amber, and the internet — for all its faults — gave me that.
Download everything. Use those data export tools. Save the photos, the posts, the comments, all of it. Platforms change, companies go under, algorithms shift. Get it all onto a hard drive you control. Then get a second hard drive. I'm not being paranoid. I'm being practical. This is all that's left of their digital life, and you are the archivist now.
How to Preserve What's Left
Let me get practical for a second, because grief brain makes it hard to think about this stuff clearly:
Voicemails: Record them off the phone using another device (play on speaker, record on a second phone or computer). Save the audio file in multiple places. There are also apps designed specifically for saving voicemails as audio files. Do this soon — phone plans get canceled, phones break, carriers purge old messages.
Text messages: Screenshot everything important. Use your phone's built-in export feature or a third-party app to export the full conversation as a file. Back it up to cloud storage AND a physical drive.
Photos and videos: Download every photo and video of them from every platform, every device, every shared album. Organize them later — right now just get them saved somewhere safe. Check their phone, their computer, their camera roll, their Google Photos, their iCloud, everywhere.
Social media: Use the platform's data download tools (Facebook, Instagram, and most major platforms have this). Download their entire account data. This includes posts, messages, photos, and comments — everything.
Email: If you have access to their email, export it. Their email contains conversations, receipts, subscriptions, and a thousand tiny details of their daily life that you might want someday.
You don't have to look at any of this right now. You don't have to organize it or make a memorial slideshow or do anything productive with it. Just save it. Put it somewhere safe. Future you — the version of you who can breathe a little easier — might want it. And if they don't, it's better to have it and not need it than to need it and have it gone forever.