It's not easy, the first time it happens, but once you adjust, it's comforting. Like being revisited by the dead in your dreams.
I'm talking about the trail left online by those friends, colleagues and family you've lost in real life. Before, when we communicated by phone or letter or even by email, those trails died when we did. It's not easy to make a phone call when you're dead.
But now, we not only communicate with others via email but also via blogs, via Facebook or MySpace pages, via instant messaging.
In fact, it's not just about communicating. It's about what geeks call "presence" - about this open space that we share, so we can see when our friends are online. We can chat with them, play games with them, share stuff in real time with them.
For many of us it's comforting. For many of us it's a way to keep friendships and connections alive in the face of great physical distance.
The problem is: What happens to these myriad connections and spaces when one of us dies?
A couple of years back a fellow technology columnist died. I didn't know him in the flesh, but we'd swapped enough emails for us to share some online spaces: He was on some of my lists like Twitter and LinkedIn.
In the online world professional and personal overlap, so we probably knew not only what we wrote about, but what we'd had for dinner.
The thing is, he's still there. His widow has not taken down his profiles, so I still see his face when I log onto my Twitter account. And of course, he's in my email address book, so his name pops up there if I start typing a similar name.
And then more recently, someone I knew much better died. Once again it was sudden, in tragic circumstances. In fact I may have been one of the last friends to see him, sharing a coffee as he passed through my hometown. We hadn't seen each other in nearly a decade.
He knew I lived here because we were Facebook buddies. And we both subscribed to something call dopplr, where you can log your future trips and see who you might bump into on your journey. Web 2.0 brought us back together.
News of his death spread via Facebook, as the full shock of it sank in. Someone set up a group to remember him.
More than a month on, people are still adding their thoughts, their memories, their photos. Some write as if he is still with us.
And on dopplr, the trips he'd planned but would never make still appear. And the other night I saw his name pop up on my instant messaging list, and for a brief, confused moment, I wondered whether it had all been a bad dream.
Of course it wasn't. But it brought home to me that the Internet has perhaps changed the way we grieve. Not perhaps, for those who are closest, who feel the loss so keenly their lives are never the same.
But for the others, those of us who knew and cared, but whose contact was sporadic; those for whom the Internet reignited connections that may otherwise have gone cold: their ghostly presence reminds us of absent friends, gives us a chance to stop for a moment and remember.
Perhaps soon we'll introduce new ways to deal with these online trails of the departed.
Already there are websites where you can post photos and memories of the deceased.
But for now I prefer this half life where those we have lost occasionally appear on our computer screens to keep us company.
@Copyright
This story cannot be reproduced without written permission from the writer. Jeremy Wagstaff is a commentator on technology and appears regularly on the BBC World Service. He can be found online at jeremywagstaff.com or via email at jeremy@loose-wire.com
