Data Scrounger
Navigating Death in the Digital Age
A few days ago, I found an email Elliot wrote just two days before he died—buried deep in a digital thread I hadn’t seen before.
It’s strange how grief keeps changing in the digital age. The past isn’t fixed. It surfaces, disappears, reappears in traces—emails, websites, thumb drives—each one carrying a version of the person you lost.
This essay was my first attempt to understand that terrain.
My essay, Data Scrounger: Navigating Death in the Digital Age, is out in Months To Years, a journal on loss.
Losing a loved one used to mean sorting through letters, papers, files, and photographs. Now there’s another layer—their digital remains.
My son Elliot was a data savant. His footprint was vast and elusive: encrypted laptops, passwords without authenticators, obscure forums, profiles that dissolved without explanation, and files filled with fragments of a life I wasn’t meant to see.
Grief in the digital age means inheriting that lingering presence—and trying to make sense of it.
Follow Months To Years on Substack.
The image they chose—a tabbed copy of Infinite Jest—felt like him.
I’ve found journals and unfinished manuscripts from my daughter Alix after she died. It was a gift!
I could not have loved your essay more. Exquisite.