By Jill E. Duffy
My first thought, upon reading the obituary of a friend, was, “Someone must be doxxing her.” I had come across it after searching her name online to see what she had published recently. She’s a writer at a high-profile publication, and I hadn’t heard from her in a few months. If I could pull up a list of her articles, I thought I’d be able to tell why. Maybe she’d been really busy or been laid off, which is all too common in the media industry. Instead of finding her byline, I saw a death announcement.
“It can’t be real,” I thought. There’s no way my friend died and I didn’t hear about it. We were only in our 40s. My mind latched onto the idea that someone was harassing her and had put up a fake obituary. But who would do such a thing? She was a sweet and private person. Nothing about it felt right.
I searched some more and within half an hour landed on her husband’s Instagram account, where his most recent post was a photo of his wife and a note saying she had died surrounded by family. My body felt still and weightless, like a day-old party balloon that sinks off in the corner.
How could this be? How could I be sitting at my desk in the middle of the day looking at a picture of my friend who had died five months ago? I’d never met her husband, and she and I didn’t have many friends in common, so no one knew to tell me she had died when she did.
By the end of the week, I’d reached out to two acquaintances who had been friends with her. They confirmed her death and were kind enough to let me grieve with them over email, but they didn’t have any more information. If she had been sick, she never said. No one knew anything. I felt ungrounded for weeks.
Reaching middle age is often accompanied by a fatality that comes with a shock, followed by the psychological acceptance of our own eventual death. The older we get, the more people we know who’ve died, and the more we grapple with questions about how we want to spend the rest of our time alive.
Midlife is also the time when many of us get our affairs in order, drafting a will and signing over power of attorney in the event we become incapacitated. My long-term partner and I had already checked off the most important of these tasks a few years ago. The paperwork was relatively straightforward since we don’t have kids, and we did it all without a lawyer. We surprised two friends over dinner one night by asking them to sign as our witnesses, and that was that. I’d even considered whether I wanted to pass on my online account logins using the settings in my password manager (my answer was no at that time). What I hadn’t thought about was how people would learn of my death. I always assumed that part would be out of my hands. After my friend died, however, I decided to be proactive.
I’d make a death-notification distribution list.
The idea was simple. I’d set up a distribution list in my email account called Death Announcement. Then I’d write a letter to a trusted person, seal it in an envelope, and write on the front that they should only open this letter in the event of my death. I didn’t want my trusted person to be my partner in case we die together. I had three good candidates and, unsure whom to pick, chose one of them at random. The letter would have information for unlocking my email account and instructions to send a message to the distribution list explaining that I died, when, and how.
The “how” has always been important to me. I understand that for privacy reasons, embarrassment, guilt, or the heartache of having to put it into words, many survivors don’t want to share the how. When I imagine my own death, however, I want people to know. I want someone to say in plain and clear language what happened to me, whether I die by illness, accident, natural occurrences, homicide, or a self-inflicted injury. If my death cannot be easily explained, they should say that, too. I’m plagued by the thought that anyone might be left guessing.
My parents and grandparents learned who among their friends and community died by reading the obituary section in their local newspaper, going to church, or through word of mouth, a phone call, or a “Did you hear about…” at a community event. I don’t have a local paper, no one ever calls me on the phone, and because I move every few years, my sense of community is unstable. I suppose some folks in a position like mine rely on Facebook for news of people’s deaths, but I haven’t had an account since the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
I spent about an hour one day scrolling through my contacts and adding names to the Death Announcement group. Selecting who should be on the list was harder than I expected. I didn’t include close family and friends since they would presumably be the first to hear about my demise. Wouldn’t it be weird for them to get an email about it a week or two later? The tough calls were acquaintances and colleagues I liked, even if we never socialized outside of work; friends of friends, who at times felt closer than that; and my accountant.
The whole exercise tested my narcissism. How dare I presume that anyone cares to know about the end of my existence! Who do I think I am?
Another problem is that I use multiple email accounts. My death notification would come from the account that I have historically used the most and which most people would trust. But some contacts only communicate with me from a different address. Would an email announcing that I’m dead, ostensibly from me, via an unknown account, look like a hoax?
No one’s perfect and no one has all the answers, so I glossed over these minor deterrents and forged ahead with my plan.
The next step was to write a short note that my trusted person could copy and paste into the death message — my letter from beyond! I saved this letter in a cloud storage account connected to the email address in question. It opens with a short goodbye and uses fill-in-the-blank placeholders that my trusted person will have to complete later, like [DATE OF DEATH] and [MANNER OF DEATH], making it the worst game of Mad Libs ever.
The last step was to write one more letter to my trusted person, which I would print, date, sign, and seal in an envelope. This letter also had a short “love you, goodbye” message at the top, followed by basic instructions for accessing my email account and how to send a message to the Death Announcement list. The letter ends with the same text that my person should copy and paste into the email. That way, if she can’t find the digital version, she at least has a paper version she can type.
Handing this sealed letter to my trusted person turned out to be the worst part. I’d hoped it would be a quiet and inconspicuous conversation, but when I saw her, we didn’t have a moment alone. We were on vacation together in a big shared house with 13 other people. I knew I might not see her again for perhaps another year (I live abroad), so I couldn’t put it off.
When I thought we had a moment of calm, I pulled my person aside, shoved the envelope into her hand, and said, “Keep this somewhere safe, and don’t open it until I die. Hopefully you’ll never have to.”
Horror washed over her face. She must have thought I was trying to tell her I was terminally ill. Clearly, she needed more context.
“You remember how my friend died not that long ago? It got me thinking that I should give someone instructions and notes about where important documents are,” I said.
Someone else in the room overheard our conversation and saw the envelope. It was one of the three other trusted-person candidates. She looked me dead in the eye and asked, “Do I get one?”
This whole process, initially designed to put me in control, was getting out of control. Did I now have to worry about hurting someone’s feelings for choosing one trusted person over another? This is not what I wanted.
I said, “No,” and decided not to explain myself further. These were my death wishes. I needed to keep them that way.
Going forward, my plan is to review and update the death notification distribution once a year. I made a recurring task in my to-do list app for January 1 so I don’t forget. Every few years, I plan to review the letter that my trusted person has, making sure all the information is up to date there as well, which means I have to ask her for the old sealed letter to swap it with the new one. This way, I’ll also know if she peeked and opened it before she was supposed to.
While my death notification system is perhaps more elaborate than it needs to be, the more I think about it, the more I wish other people had some plan for spreading word of their death. Have you thought about this? If so, what’s yours?