Legacy Contact
The person authorized to memorialize my social media account when I pass away has passed away. I need a new Legacy Contact for the website where clicks convert to currency, roughly an eighth of a penny each. After I die, you click a button confirming that I am, in fact, dead. The account switches from Active to Remembering. Will people remember a single woman who’s online every day and night if I can no longer Like things? If I can’t grow Angry about politics and science from the comfort of my couch? In Remembering mode, friending is off the table. Only condolences from friends, family, the men who claim to be Widowed and Military, evoking sad patriotism and changing their bot identities daily. I interact out of a comforting civic duty for cents on the dollar. The clicks add up. To what? For whom? I can’t say, only that I’ve accrued a debt that requires me to engage so many times per hour or my profile disappears. That, or click until I die, whichever comes first.
I was not the Legacy Contact for my last Legacy Contact; he chose his wife, who is understandably distraught and not up for discussing logistics. Becoming a Legacy Contact is a simple process, no obituary or death certificate in triplicate required, not like insurance companies and Social Security. I messaged his wife to ask if I could bring a broccoli casserole to the post-funeral potluck in the fellowship hall, though I’ve never made a casserole in my life. She asked who I was. She told me Go to Hell. Anger drives engagement; still, I shouldn’t have replied, I’m already there. In reality, no. I am on my couch, springs poking through the fabric. I lean to one side to avoid them. No hellfire, only the bluegray scroll of life’s online parade, and death’s, too, when I visit those who live in eternal Remembering mode, including three previous Legacy Contacts, none of whom I met in person.
The casket, livestreamed in my dark apartment via the platform Mourning Light, shines with a high gloss. Impossibly small from this distance. I pictured him taller. His wife’s friends and relatives prop her up. Aside from her e-outburst to me, she seems kind. Is kind, her husband told me more than once, late at night, on the screen. I was never jealous; it wasn’t like that with us. My presence warmed him, he said, asking me to stay up with him a little later each night. I’m always up. He knew me as a single woman, but I also click as other avatars. It varies. In time, I wonder if his wife would accept my friend request. I imagine sharing memes, downloads, private messages about TV shows we both like. Our conversation generating heat, energy, revenue. Maybe she’ll consider how easy it is, when the time comes, to click a button on my behalf, to convert my presence into a memory. I have the feeling, strong as a premonition, that she’ll come around. They usually do. I did.
