Hi friends,

A few days ago, I had the chance to attend “Grief in Our Time,” a virtual summit hosted by the global community event convener Reimagine. What struck me most is that every session I hopped into — regardless of whether it was covering individual loss or collective mourning from climate change, war, or myriad other worldly ills — surfaced anxiety.

It’s not a word I’ve typically associated with my grief experiences. The worst thing has already happened; what’s left to put me on pins and needles? But as I reflected, I realized that each of my Big Deaths has brought on a certain breathless fear of the future. A reminder of the shape-shifting, lifelong nature of grief, whose expression often starts well before a finite ending.

Today’s stories are a testament to that anticipation that’s bound up in our mortality: Tech reporter Ernie Smith writes on what it means to leave ever-bigger slices of our life’s work and other legacies online, a place that’s ephemeral by design. And Molly Horan’s book club recs on refusing to deal with death alone cover the compulsory collectivism of grief: the necessity of involving loved ones even when we feel bruised and unseemly, even when we’re sure they’ll say or do something wrong, or worse, fail to say or do anything at all. (Our next newsletter will have details on our members-only book club, launching in November, so stay tuned!)

Thanks for being with us in our little evanescent corner of the internet.

— Delaney + Team GraveSite

P.S. You might have noticed we’ve been experimenting with different newsletter send dates and times. Have a favorite so far? Reply to this email to let us know (or just to say ‘hi’). We’ll be locking in a standing weekly schedule soon.

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Ernie Smith

These days, many longtime bloggers, creators, and individual website owners feel the tension embodied in the sudden death and cut-short legacy of early internet pioneer Jon Postel: You could be gone in an instant, and without a plan, your website — which perhaps houses your creative output, career portfolio, or other vestige of your life and life’s work — could disappear from the public square. 

Register for GraveSite’s fourth live HellFireside Chat, happening live Tuesday, Oct. 27, at 2 p.m. ET, for candid conversations and practical advice on how to safeguard your web homes and wtf to do with all those passwords.

If you’re like the average person, you have upward of 100 online passwords, and if you don’t remember to catalog them and your wishes for the accounts they protect before you die, some email and social accounts could get lost to the ether. Same goes for your personal website, which is beholden to a domain name that you can only register for 10 years at a time, at most.

Journalists Mike De Socio and Ernie Smith join us to dig into their GraveSite reporting and take your questions. Learn who should hold your passwords, what a digital executor does, why a will alone might not get your family into your email, and how to keep your corner of the internet from going dark.

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Molly Horan

“Born alone, die alone,” is the nihilist adage you might have heard most recently from your angsty nephew (or repeated when you were full of angst yourself). Whatever nugget of truth that sentiment may hold, what humans definitely don’t do — try as some might — is grieve alone. The death of a loved one is a loss that reverberates throughout your life in a way that makes it nearly impossible to keep the grief sequestered. The people who can support you through this process make the experience a little less lonely. And if you’re struggling to find those people, some of the books on this list may help.

Founder and Editor-in-Chief: Delaney Rebernik
Co-Founder and Executive Producer: Alexis Haut
Audience Editor: Charli K Elder
Managing Editor: Jennifer Baik

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