In Memorandum

 I remember reading Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell and coming to the part where Miss Matty, considering that she will die soon, took out her mother’s stash of personal letters, read them each by the fire one last time, and burned them. It was like a funeral for the private social details of the mother’s life. Things she wanted to pass on, but not things that the world would be particularly interested in. Knowing that the letters would either be burned or exploited by another hand, she did the task, a hard task, of putting the memories to rest. I hope someday my kids will do something similar for me. It would be a high honor. I hope to leave them with enough, but not too much, not a disorganized burden, but maybe some sweet letters they can read, cry laugh sing over, then delete into digital oblivion. 

It was unsettling the first time I realized one of my Facebook friends was dead. I think they have since made an option to memorialize the page. Authors, inventors, explorers, politicians - people have historically been remembered depending on the intellectual property they left behind. Often the task to cull said property was put to those left behind, but I think it’s time to talk about being more aware of our digital lives, and working while living to make them as organized as possible for the people who will attempt to put your digital files to rest. They want to honor memory, but that is difficult to do when memory is scattered all over your digital space haphazardly. Plus, it’s calming to your personal mind to have organized files, so do yourself and your loved ones, maybe even the world, a favor, and make some space today to cull your digital memory collection. It’s time.

Here’s the letter burning part from Cranford:

We agreed to look them over separately, each taking a different letter out of the same bundle and describing its contents to the other before destroying it.  I never knew what sad work the reading of old letters was before that evening, though I could hardly tell why.  The letters were as happy as letters could be—at least those early letters were.  There was in them a vivid and intense sense of the present time, which seemed so strong and full, as if it could never pass away, and as if the warm, living hearts that so expressed themselves could never die, and be as nothing to the sunny earth.  I should have felt less melancholy, I believe, if the letters had been more so. “Chapter V”, Cranford, Elizabeth Gaskell