Their phone, their passwords, their online life
By Rachel · Updated 2026-07-21 · 3 min read
The short answer
When someone dies, their digital life does not switch off. The phone stays locked behind a passcode only they knew, the email keeps receiving, subscriptions renew, and social profiles stay live. There is no deadline on any of it. You can memorialise an account rather than delete it, which holds the page still until you are ready, and it is worth saving voicemails, photos and messages before a lapsed plan makes them vanish. Most of this can wait, one small step at a time.
The phone still lights up.
A message lands, the screen glows on the kitchen table, and for half a second it is just their phone going off the way it always did. Then it asks for a passcode you do not have, and the half second is over.
Six digits. You try their birthday. You try yours. You try the day you got the dog. The phone waits, patient and shut, holding whatever is inside it behind a number only they knew.
The locked door
So many of you have told me about this exact drawer. The phone that will not open. The laptop that wants a password. The email still quietly filling with things addressed to someone who cannot read them.
Their inbox keeps working. Newsletters arrive. A dentist confirms an appointment they will not make. The bank writes to say the statement is ready.
Somewhere a subscription renews on a card that is being cancelled. A photo app cheerfully offers "on this day". The internet has not been told.
The profile that stays
And then there is the account that is still, in every visible way, alive.
Their face at the top of the page. The last thing they posted, ordinary and unaware. Friends still writing on it, some who know, and some who heartbreakingly do not.
You hover over the settings. Memorialise, or delete. Two buttons, and neither of them is the one you want, which is the one that turns it back into them.
Somewhere on a server is the fullest record of them that exists, and you cannot get in, and you cannot bear to shut it down.
The strange intimacy of an unfinished life
There is something almost unbearable about the parts they left mid-sentence.
The draft message never sent. The playlist that stops where they stopped. The half-typed note. The search history you were never meant to see and now cannot un-see, so ordinary it undoes you. What time the pharmacy opens. How to descale a kettle.
This is the part nobody warns you about. That their digital life is not tidy. That it is a room left with the kettle still warm.
If you are trying to sort it
There is no rush written into any of this, whatever the reminders imply.
- You do not have to decide about the account today. Memorialising is not deleting. It holds the page still, and it can wait until you are ready. Closing the practical accounts is a separate, slower job, one call at a time.
- Save what you can while you can. The voicemail. The photos. The message thread you keep re-reading. Things disappear when a plan lapses, and you cannot always get them back.
- Ask for the passwords out loud, to whoever might know. A partner, a sibling, an old note in a drawer. Sometimes the six digits are written somewhere, and sometimes they are gone with them, and both are allowed to be true.
If you are the friend standing next to someone doing this, do not offer to "get it sorted" for them. Offer to sit with them while they scroll, and let them stop whenever they need to. Some of this is admin. Most of it is a goodbye. The wider bureaucracy of death can be handed off. This part usually cannot.
The phone lights up again on the table between you.
You leave it. It can ask.
More in The practical side of loss, or browse the whole library.