Digital Legacy Plan

A guide to the personal and practical elements of your digital life before you die

Angela Crocker, Vicki McLeod

• Publisher: Self-Counsel Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781770403109
• eBook ISBN: 9781770405004
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: System Administration
• Index: Computer Science

When you die, what will your digital legacy be? What will be left about you online? How will your online accounts be accessed and handled and how will you be remembered for posterity (given that there's no real erasing of the Internet)?Angela Crocker and Vicki Mcleod team up to give us ideas and tips on how to handle our digital legacies. Vicki focuses on the personal aspects of legacy, while Angela brings it down to earth with the practical, how-to aspects.One hundred years from now, there will be one billion dead people on Facebook. That's a sobering thought for each of us as we consider our own mortality. And while it can be uncomfortable to talk about death, it's important to prepare the personal and practical elements of your digital life before death. In this guide, co-authors Angela Crocker and Vicki McLeod offer solutions for the practical, social, emotional, and technical aspects of your digital legacy. They include best practices for online memorials, social media and mourning, and digital etiquette in death. Tools and resources are included throughout the book to help your digital estate planning and empower your estate's executor.From online banking to decades worth of digital family photos, copious creative or intellectual property, or personal history documented on social media, everyone has a widespread digital footprint that tells the story of our lives. How much of that story remains online after we're gone? Who has access to banking, passwords, and important digital records? What about painful or deeply personal elements of your personal or professional legacy? In life, you have the opportunity to make choices about your digital legacy. If you don't, you risk your legacy being misinterpreted, lost, or simply becoming digital litter. It's time for a digital legacy plan.

Chapter 1

Overcoming the Taboo of Death

Digital legacy planning means we must consider for ourselves, or for those we love, the reality of mortality. In order to deal with the practical and personal elements of digital life before death, we must overcome our discomfort with talking about death and dying itself. Particularly in western cultures, this discussion is largely taboo.

As we enter these discussions, it is important to seek and find comfort, and to understand the resources, online and offline, that are available to help with the conversation. This book is one such resource. There are others, and as our global digital footprints grow, people the world over are considering the implications of, and potential for, dealing with death in the digital age.

1. Accepting Our Mortality

Approaching the topic of digital legacy planning is made more challenging by the very human tendency to avoid thinking about, or discussing, death itself. Part of the challenge is simply a kind of denial. The younger you are, the more challenging this will be, and interestingly, the younger you are (that is, born after 1985, the dawn of the internet) the more likely you are to be working, playing, and creating in the digital space. There is a certain irony here.

At the same time, if you have picked up or downloaded this book, you are aware of your own mortality, or dealing with that of a loved one. If you are past middle-age, in the second half of life, perhaps you are just taking a peek at your own mortality, seeing the glimmer of your own finish on the horizon. It is possible as well that you are simply a very practical and pragmatic soul and you realize that death is in fact inevitable, and as with coordinating a vacation or buying a house, planning pays off.

No matter your age or personality, most of us share a certain discomfort with the topic of dying. We consider it morbid. Talking about death and dying with our friends or loved ones invites a certain kind of energy into the conversation. It is the energy carried by grief, laced with an anxious sense of foreboding. Talking about death can be scary.

The conversation around death is also an intimate one. It requires us to sit face-to-face, looking into the eyes of our beloveds, acknowledging the very temporal nature of our life here on earth, and theirs.

In her moving book Bloodroot: Tracing the Untelling of Motherloss (Second Story Press, 2000), author Betsy Warland shares the very touching and tender journey of being present at the bedside of her dying mother. She paints a vivid picture of the kind of letting go required by our final release. She describes a moment where she gets a glimpse of other families’ vigils.

“As I passed several patients’ rooms, I noticed visiting family or friends often sitting with them in a strange, enervating silence. They sat apart. Rarely looking at one another. Staring inexplicably up at a corner in the room.

“When I returned to Mom’s room, I looked up to see what was there. A television. Here, on their precarious edge, people watched television. As if this were intimacy. As if this was what was really happening.”

Humans, it seems, are driven to distraction in the face of intimacy, particularly at times when we are in danger of entering deeper, potentially painful emotional territory. In coaching parlance, we call this uneasy space the “edge,” as Warland intuitively does in her prose. It is a place where we start to get uncomfortable, and it is typically outside our comfort zones. Thinking and talking about death brings us to this edge and it is normal to engage in what are called “edge behaviors.” Avoidance is chief among these. Acknowledging our mortality is painful. Naturally, we want to avoid pain.

There is another reason for our denial. The late Lou Tice, in his book Personal Coaching for Results (Thomas Nelson, 1997) opens with this: “Deeply rooted within our heart of hearts is the longing to grow and bloom, to express our creative, life-affirming innermost nature … ”

Later in his book, Tice goes on to describe human beings as teleological. Tice defines “teleological” saying, “We think in terms of purpose and we’re naturally goal oriented. Having a teleological nature means that in order for us to change and grow, we need something tugging at us from the future, something to — quite literally — look forward to.”

2. Talking about Death: A Social Shift

It is fair to say that no one, other than the very ill or desperate, looks forward to death. We are wired toward a kind of goal-oriented future optimism. So, it’s natural that we have a hard time making sense of death. While there are some cultures that celebrate death — Mexico’s Dia de los Muertos, for example, or the Hindu Pitra Paksha, or the Nepalese Gai Jatra — for most North Americans and Europeans the topic has become a kind of taboo. Even our vocabulary dances around the subject of death and dying, instead talking about passing away, crossing over, seeing the light, and other euphemisms. Talking about death is almost an anathema to us, given our natural tendencies to avoid pain (or painful subjects) and to look forward to the future.

Interestingly, there is a movement in North America, and one that is growing globally, to open up discussions about death. As Dr. Kathy Kortes-Miller wrote in her book Talking About Death Won’t Kill You, (ECW Press, 2018), “Increased online exposure to death and dying gives us opportunities to learn about death from the virtual safety of our computers and digital devices. It brings conversations about illness and death out of the closet and into the light, acclimatizing us to the idea that death is part of life.” The internet is helping with this, allowing those who wish to broaden the discussion the ability to connect in like-minded communities worldwide and have access to tools, resources, and guidance in dealing with delicate subject matter.

Take, for example, Death Cafes. The Death Cafe model was developed by the late Jon Underwood and Sue Barsky Reid, based on the ideas of Bernard Crettaz. Essentially, at a Death Cafe, people, often strangers, gather and eat cake, drink tea, and discuss death. The discussion is group-directed with no agenda or specific objective other than the nonprofit organization’s stated purpose which is “to increase awareness of death with a view to helping people make the most of their (finite) lives.” It is a social discussion rather than a grief support group or counseling session.

Death Cafes spread quickly across Europe, North America, and Australasia. According to the organization’s website, deathcafe.com, there have been more than 6,500 Death Cafes in 56 countries since it launched in September, 2011.

Another example is Death Over Dinner. Death Over Dinner started with a University of Washington graduate course called Let’s Have Dinner and Talk About Death, taught by Michael Hebb and Scott Macklin. It evolved into a website, deathoverdinner.org, and has become a global project. It launched in 2013 and in a single night tracked more than 500 dinners in 20 countries. Since then there have been more than 100,000 #deathdinners around the world.

The project provides a simple set of tools to help families and friends address the topic of mortality. Based on a collaboration between medical and wellness practitioners, the project brings together a wide array of individuals including oncologists, gravestone designers, palliative care experts, authors, curators, healthcare CEOs, and artists in a powerful movement to bring the conversation about death into mainstream culture.

Founded by mortician and author Caitlin Doughty, The Order of the Good Death “is a group of funeral industry professionals, academics, and artists exploring ways to prepare a death phobic culture for their inevitable mortality.” Essentially, the Order supports a death-positive movement. Its mission, according to its website, “is about making death a part of your life. That means committing to staring down your death fears — whether it be your own death, the death of those you love, the pain of dying, the afterlife (or lack thereof), grief, corpses, bodily decomposition, or all of the above. Accepting that death itself is natural, but the death anxiety and terror of modern culture are not.” The movement is growing with more than 100,000 followers on Facebook and members from across the world.

What these movements have in common is a reframing of how we view death. While recognizing our own mortality is difficult, to do so is not necessarily morbid. It gives us the opportunity to take stock, and to consider what really matters to us. Accepting our mortality means that we can more fully embrace our daily lives and it can act as a catalyst for us to think about what comes after, to consider what will remain after we are gone. It allows us to have a straightforward conversation with those we love or those responsible for executing our wishes after we are gone about what we want our legacies to be and how we want them implemented. Recognizing our own mortality is an essential part of creating your digital legacy plan.

In learning to accept mortality and overcome the taboo of talking about death, we may well look to the wisdom of the Dalai Lama. In his foreword to The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, by Sogyal Rinpoche, His Holiness had this to say: “Death is a natural part of life, which we will all surely have to face sooner or later. To my mind there are two ways we can deal with it while we are alive. We can either choose to ignore it or we can confront the prospect of our own death and, by thinking clearly about it, try to minimize the suffering it can bring.”

To quote the Death Cafe Facebook page, “Talking about sex won’t get you pregnant and talking about death won’t kill you.” In fact, it may very well prepare you to face your own death, to act compassionately and competently on behalf of your loved ones, and relieve the anxiety and suffering of your children, heirs, or caregivers.

3. Seeking Spiritual Comfort Online and Offline

Depending on the reason you have purchased this book, you may find yourself in need of spiritual comfort as you progress through it. It is possible you are an heir or executor, or the good friend or loved one of someone who has recently died. If you are crafting your own digital legacy plan, you will be contemplating your own mortality, as we discussed in the preceding section. This can be a tender place to be. Timing matters. Take on what you can, as you can.

Angela had the all too common experience of supporting her mother in hospice. Their days were filled with cups of tea, quiet conversation, art journaling, and the medical practicalities of her mom’s care. It was an emotional time for them both as her mother had only recently retired. She was too young to die yet cancer decided otherwise. Suddenly, all of the end-of-life conversations had to happen in a rush without structure or planning.

After her mother’s death, amid her grief, Angela fulfilled her duties as executor of the estate and dealt with myriad legal and practical details, as all executors must do. Along the way, she realized that she did not have the password to her mom’s laptop, a tidbit of information that would surely turn up, eventually. Yet, it took nearly five years for Angela to find that password among dozens of personal files, many of which were an emotional trigger that renewed Angela’s grief and slowed her progress through the records. Even with the password available, as of this writing, Angela hasn’t had the courage to use the password to access the computer. It’s a digital vault that might contain an emotional minefield. Angela wants to be prepared before she triggers that potential emotional explosion, an unintended side effect of her mom’s digital legacy. This particular challenge of accessing digital information is unique to the twenty-first century. We are the first generations that have had to cope with it.

Later in the book we will discuss this and other aspects of dealing with death in the twenty-first century. The internet has changed us — not only in the dramatic ways we work and play, but also in the way we mark significant milestones such as weddings, anniversaries, births, deaths. Death, and the grief that goes with it, was once a very private experience. In the age of social media and the world wide web, death, like so much else, has become public.

Around the time we were drafting this book, world-renowned handbag designer Kate Spade and celebrity chef and writer Anthony Bourdain took their own lives within the same week. Most of us found out about this news via social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We amplified the news by posting it online for friends and followers to see. Around the world, people expressed their shock, sadness, and sympathy online. Through shared grief we sought comfort and understanding. Despite the sad circumstances of their deaths, they left behind legacies. Kate Spade’s fashion aesthetic will influence generations to come. Anthony Bourdain has affected and changed the way the world views food and travel.

The decision to post, or not to post, about a death is a personal one. Much depends on the nature of the death and the renown of the person. For the families of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain, there was not much choice. Notoriety is often the cost of celebrity. For those of us who are not celebrities, we are faced with a choice and much will depend on our own preferences and those of our loved ones.

In late 2017, Vicki lost her beloved mother-in-law. She was 92 when she died and though she had started school in the days of the horse and sleigh, she had a computer and used email until very near the end of her life. While she had a healthy curiosity about just about everything, she never opened a social media account. Her private life remained private, as was the custom for most of her generation.

When Vicki and her husband received news of her passing, they instinctively sought comfort, first with each other and then as they notified more distant family and friends. The family chose the telephone, email, and snail-mail as methods of notification, as well as the printing of a traditional obituary in the newspapers.

Much of Vicki’s daily life is typically played out openly online, setting an example with posting habits, being authentic, showing up in joy and sorrow, and sharing personal and professional insights and struggles. She feels it is important to advocate for good digital citizenship and positive social media. In this instance though, she chose to seek comfort in the world of touch and taste, what the digitally savvy call IRL — in real life. Partly this was out of respect for the privacy of her mother-in-law and the family and partly out of a desire to grieve privately.

In addition to cards, flowers, and offers of foodstuffs the family received many digital condolences via email, text, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger. They opted to forego a digital book of condolence as many of their mother’s peers had predeceased her and those remaining were generally analog. Even though the digital options for notification and memorialization are numerous (we’ll cover them in Chapter 7) this particular family chose a more traditional path for comfort and individual spiritual solace.

In a contrasting example, Carly (not her real name) began sharing the illness, treatment, and ultimate demise of her father very publicly in her Facebook feed. Part of her vigil involved ongoing trips from her small suburban town into the city where her father was hospitalized for treatment. She posted alm...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Overcoming the Taboo of Death
• Chapter 2: What Is a Legacy?
• Chapter 3: Assets and Access
• Chapter 4: Legacy Planning Options
• Chapter 5: Digital Estate Planning
• Chapter 6: Transitioning Social Media, Websites, and Other Tools
• Chapter 7: Online Memorial Planning
• Chapter 8: Death and Dying in the Digital Age
• Chapter 9: The Social Shift: Death at the Intersection of Digital and Analog
• Download Kit
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Notice to Readers
• Self-Counsel Press thanks you for purchasing this ebook.