As long as we have an official legal presence, we always leave remnants when we die. I bet some deceased people still get junk mail and phone marketer calls. I've heard of social security still paying out benefits to deceased people.
There's sometimes bills to pay, property to deal with, services to inform. I've never had to do it, but I would guess it is similar to trying to prove your last name is different, which usually takes a copy of my marriage license.
But the Internet makes it weird to another level, where people set up a shade of themselves without much accountability. I probably still have a MySpace account, but for all they know, I've died. In trying to find an email address I like, I went through several, or set up anonymous email addresses, and forgotten all the passwords. Those could still be floating around somewhere. I don't know Hotmail's policy. Is Hotmail still a thing?
I play World of Warcraft. In one of my guilds (voluntary online community within WoW), there was a man whose avatar's name was Wrecker. He was older, and I can't honestly say I knew much personally about him, but he was involved online and a pretty good warrior. I'm not sure who in the real world passed it to our guild leader that Wrecker had passed away. But WoW doesn't delete accounts, and his name still sat there in our guild roster. Out of respect, our guild leader moved it to the position of assistant guildmaster (ousting the person holding that position without so much as a by-your-leave, but I'll refrain). For all I know, that account is still there.
Someone showed me a news story about a girl who committed suicide. It was sad, she'd gotten in some minor trouble for underage drinking and a talking-to from her parents. I'm guessing there had to be more, because underage drinking doesn't have a lot of stigma unless you kill someone and her parents didn't even seem off-the-hook upset. Which still shouldn't warrant killing yourself, pretty much nothing should do that. And there was a link to her Facebook page and I asked what it was if she had passed away. The person who showed it to me explained it was sort of a memorial where friends left memories.
I'm experiencing that now. An old family friend of ours, known fondly as Uncle Manny, who I haven't seen in a long while, suffered a heart attack and had a triple bypass. Over ten days later, he still hadn't woken up and his family, who had time to gather, decided to pull the ventilator. All of us were kept appraised by his wife on his Facebook, and each post was flooded with prayers and comments and well-wishers. And people started posting pictures, writing stories. It was weird, knowing he wasn't awake, but seeing pictures of him pop up on my newsfeed. It was surprisingly intimate, not so much with the posters, but with Uncle Manny himself. I often didn't read who put the story up, but I relived some of my memories, and enjoyed some of other people's memories, expanding the view of the man in his final hours.
What happens to our Internet shades when we die? They're just fragments of ourselves, like finding a notebook we wrote in or a treasure we stashed and forgot, but at one point they stood in for our actual presence, and sometimes they continue to stand unsupported, even though the person behind them is gone. Someone said if they hadn't talked to a Facebook friend in six months and saw a birthday notice, they'd check their Facebook before commenting, to make sure nothing had happened to them. Because Facebook will still keep telling you their birthday.
Goodbye, Uncle Manny.
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