I'm Dead. Carry On

I'm Dead. Carry On.

Perhaps it won't happen soon. Perhaps if I eat right, stop drinking, exercise, and actually go to those annual checkups, I'll be able to put it off for 20, 30, 100 more years as science and medicine advance ahead of my decrepitude. But people younger than me are dying all the time, so there are no guarantees. It will happen and I will be dead.

And what will I leave behind besides my body and few belongings? If I haven't created a corpus of work to be admired such as heralded novels, artwork, articles about death or scientific discoveries I could be quickly forgotten. Except in this digital age where traces of our life are  spread across the Internet I will have left a great deal more than my ancestors' scraps of notes, letters, and worn furniture. I will have left photos, tweets, Facebook updates, emails all stored in the cloud that people can pore over and get some glimpse into what my life was like (at least from the 1980s on).  

But what about going forward? Planned out I could truly speak to the living from beyond the grave. With tools such as HootSuite and Buffer I can lay out a schedule of posts to be sent out 1 week, 1 month 1 year or more past my demise.

"Having a blast! Wish you were here!" "I think I just sprouted a new daffodil."  "Did anyone feel that? I think the cosmos just shifted a bit."  A 'selfie' posted to Instagram that's just a black rectangle. You get the idea.  

This of course assumes you have the mental and physical capacity to plan these out before you die.

A self-managed social media campaign is one way to leave a legacy. Another might be to draw up a document that assigns someone the duties of a "social media proxy" who can manage your online identity for you after you've bitten the dust. 

However you work out the details this is a much more surefire way of communicating from beyond the grave than through a two-bit medium or a Ouija board. I'd love to get an email from my Mom, who died several years ago, reminding me to make the bed and that she loves me.

I'm getting prepared. I already have a special Twitter account @deadbobmorse. And I already have one follower. Is that creepy?