A Year After He’s Gone, My Grandpa’s Phone Still Rings
From WhatsApp to Instagram, our social media presence creates the illusion that even after death, there is still an open conversation between us and a loved one.
My parents, grandmother, and I were 40 hours into a 56-hour stay-at-home order in our family’s Istanbul apartment in December when we decided to put up our New Year’s tree. My dad installed our topper, which resembles the Taj Mahal. Glitter stuck on our fingers, we danced around the tree and momentarily forgot that the pandemic had trapped us in our living room.
My 78-year-old grandmother wanted me to send the photos — but this was not a simple request, because she doesn’t own a smartphone; she has a phone from the late 2000s that barely takes photos. For photos or a video call, she pulls out a second phone, the clunky Android she carries around all day, which used to belong to my grandpa.
I didn’t want to send them because it would mean reopening my WhatsApp conversation with my grandfather — whom I called my dede; something I’d been avoiding doing in the year since he had died.
We had all witnessed my grandma answering my grandpa’s phone, arguing with the callers and complaining that the calls were scams. Of course they were. No one who actually knew him would still be calling.
But it turns out my grandmother is not alone in wanting to hold on to a loved one’s digital identity.
As our digital footprint becomes a part of our identity, our last words have started outliving us in ways that transcend people’s memories of us. From WhatsApp to Instagram, our social media presence creates the illusion that even after death, there is still an open conversation between us and a loved one.
“Because someone’s social media profile looks the same before and after they die, that creates a powerful sense of continuity that some people find comforting and others find distressing,” says Patrick Stokes, an associate professor of philosophy at Deakin University in Australia and the author of the book Digital Souls: A Philosophy of Online Death. “We’re still learning how to live with the digital dead.”
We are still in the process of figuring out what that means. In 2019, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who lost her husband, Dave Goldberg, in 2015, announced changes to the company’s policies on memorialization to help alleviate the pain of social media on those who lost someone. The digital behemoth, which had 1.84 billion daily active users as of Dec. 2020, launched tribute pages, gave loved ones more agency to moderate what goes on such profiles, and announced it would use AI to prevent events and birthdays from deceased users to appear on their platform.
My dede, a former NATO general, emerged as a techie around 2011, shortly after my departure for college on the East Coast. He got himself a modem, a laptop, and of course an email address. During one of our weekly phone calls, he asked me to send him emails. I regularly told him what I was up to, and he gave me status updates on my grandma’s latest jar of pickles (he loved pickled cabbage) or a trip to the hospital that he downplayed but which had clearly unsettled him.
In his carefully drafted emails, he capitalized the most important words for full emphasis. “DENIZ BEAUTIFUL DENIZ, your grandma and I whole-heartedly congratulate you on graduating from college and getting your great diploma,” one of his emails read in 2015. “DENIZ, You know tomorrow IS YOUR BIRTHDAY,” he wrote a few months later.
A few weeks before the end of 2019, my grandpa met me at the Istanbul Airport after my nine-hour flight from New York City, my new home. I was back in Turkey for New Year’s and he had insisted on coming because it was his first chance to see the airport, which had opened a year earlier.
On Dec. 17, I sent him a photo of him and grandma, walking down the street with locked arms after a family dinner where I remember quite well that he had nachos for the first time — and loved them. On Dec. 21, he asked me to take a video of my grandma molding tiny meatballs in our kitchen. He liked the image of her shaking a tray full of meatballs dabbed in flour. Half an hour into Dec. 31, we received a call from the hospital where he was taken earlier that day. He had had a fever and a dry cough a few days ago and that day, all of a sudden, he had trouble breathing.
“A lot of old people died from pneumonia-like symptoms recently,” the doctor told my dad later: “An odd flu season.” We never found out whether what he died of was Covid; we barely knew it as a mysterious virus in China at the time. The disease was not reported in Turkey until March.
Even though I was already dealing with a loss, 2020 seemed to be determined to further test my relationship with mortality. I was back in the U.S. in my Brooklyn apartment when the heat stopped working on one of the first days of quarantine, in early March. I texted my super on WhatsApp but when I didn’t hear from him for a day — which was unusual for him, I felt the urge to check our conversation history. My message remained unseen as he hadn’t been online for a few days. When I complained about the lack of heat to my upstairs neighbor, he lent me a portable heater and told me that our super, Jorge, was in the hospital for pneumonia. Jorge was 41 years old when he died from Covid. He left behind two young kids. For the longest time his profile picture remained as The Joker. Now it’s a gray silhouette.
As the pandemic progressed, a Turkish sports commentator, who had helped me during a news production internship back in 2013, died of cancer at age 42. We had recently reconnected on Twitter and talked about the Beatles and an eggplant-parm recipe. That ended up being our last conversation. Shortly after his death, his family tweeted a thank you from his account, which still remains. We both follow each other to this day.
Of course, it is not new for tech companies to grapple with how to handle mortality on their platforms. Facebook allows relatives to turn a deceased person’s account into a memorial one without giving access to the actual account. Relatives can also choose to remove a loved one’s profile entirely by reaching out to Facebook and confirming that they are an immediate family member or an executor of the account holder. They also have to provide their loved one’s obituary or memorial card, according to the website. This is in addition to another option on the platform which, since 2015, has allowed people to designate a “legacy contact,” a person who will manage their account upon their death. Instagram, the popular social media platform under the umbrella of Facebook, has similar policies for loved ones who want to memorialize or remove an account. Twitter, on the other hand, doesn’t memorialize profiles but allows family members to request a removal of account.
Yet, a lot of people don’t see their digital assets as part of their estate planning — although those assets, or what researchers call “digital remains,” have become a prominent part of our grieving process, replacing a box of letters or a dusty photo album. “The ‘face’ of the other persists” on social media “just as they did while alive, which makes it easier for us to encounter them–except now they are silent,” Dr. Stokes says. People have many reasons to hold onto that — whether they are relatives of a deceased politician who still tweet from his account or my grandma scrolling through the videos on my grandpa’s WhatsApp to connect to her husband of six decades.
As deaths from the pandemic have mounted, millions of families around the world are missing loved ones, and grief has become a visceral part of life, which seems to go on no matter who gets left behind. The burden of loss persists even or sometimes especially when we feel like we might be nearing the end of the pandemic and governments around the world are making great strides in vaccine rollout. It makes me and my grandmother wonder whether my grandpa would have been alive if only we knew what we know now. We also wonder if he would have died regardless of how our alternate universes pan out more than a year after his passing.
Still, we know we have to work with what we have to process what we can. “I’m just a woman who wants to be in touch with her husband,” my grandma, who still pays the bills for my grandpa’s phone, tells me. “That is nothing to be ashamed of.”
