Catherine Lindsay wasn't thinking about death. Then she got a text message from her mom.

So I think this was back in April or sometime around then and I just get this kind of long

text from my mom out of nowhere letting me know that she was doing sort of a review

of her Google privacy settings and when you take a look at that one of the things they

have a section for us something called like your digital legacy and there's a few different sort

of things you can do in there and one of one of the options is designating a person that that

would go to if you were inactive for a certain period of time and sort of the standard that they

suggest just three months and so that's what she clicked but it was kind of a weird text because

you know even in that message we weren't saying what that meant the word inactivity is very broad

but we knew what it meant was sort of I was being given this for after she one day passed away.

That text sent Lindsay a freelancer who writes about technology and culture into research mode.

They just started thinking about what I would do when I get those things like would I read through

the emails what I read through the documents is there anything I would see that I wouldn't like

or that would be surprising do I delete it all is that like is that rude I don't know I still

after all this don't know what I would do with it but I was thinking about how with each year

the people who are passing away are people who have spent more time online and so have larger digital

footprints and so this is something that it likely had already started and is only just going to get

more complicated I was just doing a lot of thinking about what that would mean what kind of

inheriting someone's digital footprint would entail and you know how there's not really any

guidelines for what to do with it. Human lives now linger on in digital space and that raises a lot

of questions do you take comfort in what's left behind or as Lindsay writes in a recent piece for

the Atlantic do you shut it all down and accept a second death so today on the show how to grieve a

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