Chapter 58: Digital Footprint Deletion

It feels so weird to sit at mom’s desk and use her machine – knowing that she’ll never come back to it.  Even her headphones are still out – she used them often to watch youtube videos while sitting in this chair.  Sigh.

Fortunately, the task of digital records management was fairly easy – well, from a technical perspective, anyway.  Mom was never on any social media so today’s exercise is literally just a review of her hard drive and email program.  I guess maybe this is just the frame of mind I’m in, but it felt emotional to open up documents mom had directly created to manage her piano teaching or volunteer duties with the church, confirm dad doesn’t need any bit of detail in them, and then…”send to trash.”  Even unsubscribing her from various email distribution lists felt sad.  But, this machine is destined for an ecostation, so it needs to be totally wiped down.

The biggest heartache was to go through mom’s email.  To read messages that mom sent so recently, including to me – I can hear her voice in the words. I suppose on the one hand, it was nice to see that the final messages in mom’s inbox were from my sister – mom must have kept them easily visible to look at them often; that made me happy.  But then, I had the rather to face the rather unpalatable task of reviewing her contacts list and cross-referencing that to my personal records to ensure I hadn’t missed anyone on the terrible announcement from the day she died.

As if doing that wasn’t sad enough, I felt so much worse when I realized that – yup, I somehow managed to make the worst possible cut and paste error.  I somehow excluded mom’s favourite piano student, “Little A.”  Mom taught Little A for years and often spoke of her fondly.  In fact, Little A’s wedding in mid-August was the last formal event that mom attended with dad before she died.  And now, I have to play Bad News Bear and let her know that mom is gone.  Ugh.