Someone I loved very much died about two years ago. A few months before she died, she sent me a long Facebook message about the fact of her impending death. It was important. It contained, I think, an instruction about how to live my life, about what she needed me to do for her. She said, I think, that the idea of me following this instruction helped her make peace with her own death. I have tried my best to do what I think she asked of me, have sometimes failed, have sometimes done alright.I’m saying I think because I cannot be entirely sure about the contents of the message. I went to look for it recently, for the first time in a year or so, and couldn’t find it. Her Facebook account has been deleted; all the messages are gone, most of the record of our communication since I was a little girl. In our chat log, her name has been replaced by Unknown user and her profile picture with that blank grey silhouette, formless and genderless. All her messages, which I know often stretched into paragraphs, have been replaced by one line each of time-stamped nothing — not even an empty chat bubble, just a unit of empty space on the screen. What feels like the cruelest part is that all of my messages are still there, and so the effect is that I’ve been having, for years, a strange and stilted conversation with myself. I can see each time I responded to her characteristically thoughtful and loving messages days or even weeks late, all these awful one-word answers, but I cannot see the messages themselves — I can see myself thanking her for the book recommendation, but I cannot see what book she recommended to me, and now I will never know, I can’t remember, I’m trying and I can’t. The record of her has been hidden somewhere. All that’s left is me.It may strike you that this could serve as a neat, trite little metaphor for the experience of grieving a death in general. This is one of my most persistent fascinations with the internet: its natural tendency to whittle down all soci