As I start to write these lines, I am sitting on one of the trains of the Rhaetian Railway. This is one of several modes of transport which lead me from Basel to a visit of my family in South Tyrol, where I am originally from. The smaller the villages in this Wes Anderson-like setting become, the more they can be reduced to the simple rhythm of houses-school-church intervals. Attached to each village church, walled yards with several crosses reach out into the air. Small cemeteries, which still appear to be able to host the deceased of these settlements in their very centres.

After crossing the border and arriving in the small town of Mals, I change from Swiss postbus to Italian railway. I first stop for a coffee in the Bahnhofbar, where the German-language newspaper "Dolomiten" awaits at the counter. Several pages in it are dedicated to the recently deceased of the region – a central obituary section that successfully managed to vaccinate this newspaper against the decline of print media. A small index on the cover page of the newspaper makes sure to unerringly open the paper on the right page, number 8 today, allowing to immediately start scrolling over the photos of the deceased and study the names of those mourning them.

When I was young, we often joked how the elderly (and not only) would directly jump to the reading of the obituaries. I recall my grandfather studying them closely, sometimes mumbling, sometimes commenting. Then I remember the weird sensation of finding him one day on those pages. A mixture of officialness and a sad interpretation of Andy Warhol’s 15-minutes-of-fame notion. Clearly, for a region of a bit more than half a million inhabitants spread on several valleys and where a car drive from its western to its eastern end requires three hours, such a collective morning is an important moment of social cohesion: 'today we mourn…'

Years ago, I noticed how the online portal of the same newspaper would sometimes link to an online obituary in cases of especially tragic deadly accidents or the departure of important political or cultural figures. Named Trauerhilfe(.it), and launched in 2009, it allows posting a photo and a text in memory of a deceased person. Users then have the option of lighting a memorial candle or leaving written condolences. A column also displays and ranks the 'deceased with most candles'. Interestingly, this portal seems to add a digital post-mortem to people who were mainly part of a generation that did not have a very active, or even a non-existent, online life.

But how about those who did? What kind of digital remains are we leaving behind? Important historic figures outlive us through (their) books, monuments, tales, religion… Also families can share memories of their departed ones over generations. Gone but not forgotten, yet the ways and the duration of how we "survive" death is occurring unequally and is somewhat proportional to a persons (un)popularity.

Albeit, we seem to enter an era that sees a sort of democratisation of this transmission, whether this is intentional or not. Most people who use social media have already experienced the death of a person who was part of our network. Birthday alerts or other forms of inappropriate reminders to interact with this person may have reached us, as if the person’s soul was still wandering around online. Our digital corpses seem to survive us, and some algorithms continue to relate and engage with them until someone informs a platform that a user departed. We are, at least for a limited time, being transformed into digital zombies.

And the streets look so empty in the morning
There'll be no one out at night for the lights to shine down on
But the dead'll still be walking 'round in this old world alone
Oh, well after life is over the afterlife goes on

Hearts break when loved ones journey on
At the thought that they're now forever gone
So we tell ourselves they're all still around us all the time
Gone but not forgotten, just memories left behind[1]

How do we die online? How are we being digitally archived, and how much control do we have over this process? How haunting and surreal can the digital presences of the departed become? Or will the blurring of the line between digital life and real death make the latter less traumatic?