Digital Messages to Loved Ones Reach Out After Death

A growing number of websites and apps are allowing people to document important information, store their funerary preferences and send postmortem digital messages to loved ones. Many, such as Final Wish, came about as the result of encounters with illness or the unexpected loss of a friend or family member. While spending six days in a hospital, creator Andrew Smith began to realize how poorly prepared he was for all of the questions around death. “I just wanted to make sure that I had that information documented,” he said, according to Senior Citizens Magazine. “And then I thought, there’s a lot of people in the same situation as me and if I can create a website to help people out, that would be great.”

Digital Messages Meet Range of Needs

Smith isn’t the only one looking to technology as a solution. Following the loss of her father and a childhood friend, Gaby Eirew created RecordMeNow, which prompts people to record digital answers to questions that may help children through the grieving process when hearing such messages from their loved ones. A cloud-based system called Safe Beyond, which bills itself as a “digital time capsule,” allows users to store written and video messages to be viewed at a specified time, such as a child’s 40^th birthday or a grandchild’s graduation. Its creator, Moran Zur, is likewise no stranger to death: He lost his father when he was 25, and his wife had a close call with brain cancer. “My father was a man of advice,” he told The New York Times. “You start thinking about things that I didn’t get to ask him.”

Meanwhile, TSOLife encourages bonding between caregivers and senior living residents by enabling them to record their charges’ stories for future generations. And programs such as Keeper Memorials and Dear Lifetime let people create and preserve digital archives for memorial purposes.

While some websites, including Once I’ve Gone, encourage members to store documents and information as well as digital messages to loved ones, legal experts say it’s preferable to limit digital legacies to the emotional domain — especially if there’s an inheritance dispute. “If a lawyer is not part of that situation and this person is going off half-baked and now all of a sudden this video surfaces in a probate contest, you have a lawyer standing there with his tongue hanging out,” John Dadakis, a partner at Holland & Knight, told The New York Times.

But there’s no reason why technology can’t be used for more lighthearted pursuits – such as playing a final prank. In video footage that recently went viral, Dublin grandfather Shay Bradley’s voice – and a loud knocking – seemed to emerge from his coffin at a funeral in Ireland.

“Where the f*** am I?” the recording said. “Let me out, let me out. It’s f***ing dark in here.” And as his friends’ and family’s tears turned into laughter, he sang, “Hello again, hello. I just called to say goodbye.”