The easy way out would be to opt for the automated message, but I thought about the recipient and the message that they might someday be on the business end of: would I want it to be dry tech boilerplate, or a true message from me to them?
COMMUNICATING ACROSS THE VOID While a final will and testament is meant to be a last word, sending messages to loved ones after the fact is also an area that’ s being explored in both Western and Eastern cultures. In Otsuchi, a town in northeastern Japan, following the death of a cousin, 70-year old Itaru Sasaki set up a space in his backyard overlooking the Pacific Ocean that would afford him a way to cope. Consisting of an empty phone booth— complete with a phone connected to nothing— it allowed Itaru the space in which to communicate with his cousin over the waves of the wind, hence its name: Kaze no Denwa( The Wind Phone). After the devastation of the 2011 tsunami, others heard about his phone booth and began to make the trek to Otsuchi in order to similarly communicate with relatives that had been lost in the disaster. The Kaze no Denwa was the subject of an NHK documentary in early 2016, the footage of which was recently featured in a full episode of This American Life.
While the Kaze no Denwa gives survivors an avenue to communicate with those that have passed, SafeBeyond is attempting to do something similar in reverse. The service allows its users to save messages and upload messages to SafeBeyond’ s servers, which can then be sent to their loved ones in a variety of ways, whether it be during special occasions( such as weddings), when they are in a specific geographic location, or on predetermined dates. In addition, the service can manage a user’ s digital estate, storing things like social media accounts, email addresses, passwords, and digital media files to be passed on after one’ s death. WHAT SHOULD WE BE THINKING ABOUT?
Having gone through the process of setting up Google and Facebook’ s legacy contacts, as well as the questionnaires for Cake, Willing, and other services, I was struck by a few things: Your circle is smaller than you might think. We all likely speak and interact with our co-workers and friends on a regular basis, but when questions such as“ who will receive your property?” or“ to whom should all of your emails and passwords be given?” arise, you might find that the circle of people that you truly trust gets very small, very fast.
Services like online will-builders expect consumers to have an answer at the ready for a question they might never have considered. Instead of asking“ who” when it comes to these types of questions, might it actually be more beneficial for these services to ask“ why”?
24 | ART OF DYING