Elaine Kasket
Psychologist Elaine Kasket explores the act of leaving video Wills and final messages for family and friends – technology allows us to, but is it something we should be doing?
Cliff was on the phone to Iain Dale, a presenter at LBC radio. In a voice that seemed tinged with wonder at still being alive, he described the night that he picked up his phone and recorded a video Will and final messages for his two daughters.
Cliff was quarantined at home when he made the recordings, unable to be with his family. Struggling to breathe and pouring with sweat, he was convinced that Covid-19 was about to end his life.
Revealing some of the fears and assumptions we have about this type of planning, Iain remarked that making these recordings must have been as traumatic as enduring the symptoms of the virus. But Cliff set him straight:
“All I can say is, once I’d done that – and once I’d accepted that maybe I’m not going make it – it was an amazing calmness over me… Que sera sera, you know? I’ve tidied up all these things. Never did I ever realise that you actually accept it quite calmly and think, ‘OK, if I don’t get through this, I’m ready to go.’”
Technology makes it easy
When thinking about the end of our lives, should we follow Cliff’s example and leave messages behind for our loved ones? Marie Curie’s Planning ahead checklist suggests it, and technology makes it easy – our phones can record video or audio, and there are dozens of services that can store and deliver messages for us when we are no longer here.
Even so, deliberately recording messages for posthumous dispatch does not seem to be a widespread practice, and only in certain types of death do people tend to expect a note.
Our failure to compose final messages in advance may have nothing to do with avoidance, or with discomfort with thinking about death. I felt no psychological resistance in sorting out my will and lasting powers of attorney, for example, but I found that recording messages was a different story.
A digital legacy company had sent me a free link, inviting me to try the service by recording video messages for my daughter and other loved ones. I was well, the sunshine was pouring in through the window, and I struggled mightily with the task. Not knowing the hour of my death, and unable to predict what my daughter’s circumstances and needs would be at that time, I couldn’t imagine what to say.
Every time I tried, I felt moved to go express my feelings to her now or spend some quality time with her. I’m reminded of the irritable last words of Karl Marx. When asked by his housekeeper whether he had any final messages, he reportedly shouted, “Go on, get out! Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough!”
Feeling connected to loved ones
When it comes to the people we love, no one wants to end up as the fool who didn’t say enough. But say enough to do what? To assure people of our affection, to spare their future pain, to give them something else we imagine that they will need? Ultimately, no one can predict what family and friends will crave, or what kind of communication would either comfort or upset them in their grief.
I once encountered an article in which people talked about the utterly unexpected things that made them feel most connected to their dead loved ones: a coin, a fridge magnet, a denture. It’s unlikely that the deceased in any of these instances could ever have predicted which object would mean most to someone.
When people talk about a ‘good death’, they often mention the ‘Four Things’ listed by palliative care specialist Dr Ira Byock, which are: ‘Please forgive me’, ‘I forgive you’, ‘Thank you’ and ‘I love you’. Dr Byock reported that these were things dying people most wanted to hear. But death respects no script, especially when it arrives quickly, unexpectedly, under extreme medical circumstances or at times of physical separation, as with Covid-19.
The inability to exchange certain words may feel most painful when we haven’t taken the opportunity to say them earlier. Dr Byock emphasised this with his Four Things: the phrases aren’t a prescription for what to say at death, but rather advice for what to do throughout life: heal rifts, forgive one another, show gratitude, express love. When I abandoned the video-message attempt, it was because I suspected such messages wouldn’t matter so much – to me or to her – not as long as I had taken care, throughout my life, to say enough.
That said, when death draws near, many of us may feel moved – like Cliff did – to reach out to loved ones to say one last thing. Palliative care specialist Dr Kathryn Mannix has a list of prompts in her book With the End in Mind that can be helpful at the end. Whatever impact Cliff’s goodbye messages would have had on his daughters, recording them helped him to feel ‘ready to go,’ and that was reason enough. In emotional and psychological terms, funerals are for the bereaved and not for the dead, and last messages are for the dying as much as they are for the eventual bereaved.
As Byock and Marx would both agree, the things you express to your loved ones today, and every day, may prove far more important than any messages you lay down for some future tomorrow.
Tips for recording a goodbye message
Send files direct
While it’s easy to record messages on a phone, be aware that password protection on devices or online accounts may prevent your loved ones from accessing them. Next of kin don’t usually have access to content in deceased individuals’ accounts or on their password-protected devices. For avoidance of doubt, send any digital text, audio or video messages as a file directly to them, or to someone else who can pass them on.
Do your homework
Many ‘digital legacy’ services exist – or have existed – to store and deliver text, audio or video messages after a person’s death, sometimes as a ‘last goodbye’, sometimes as messages at scheduled intervals. Many of these go out of business. If you use one, do your homework and look for one that is well-established.
Remember grief is idiosyncratic
Your loved ones may welcome after-death communications from you, or they may not. Sometimes they may crave them, and sometimes avoid them, and this can change over time. Composing final messages may primarily be helpful to you in coping with the reality of your own death. That said, if it doesn’t feel important, it is not an obligation or a necessary part of planning.
Say those things now, not later
Communication with your loved ones throughout your life will be far more important than your final words. If there is hurt, regret or unexpressed emotion within your relationships, find ways of addressing this sooner rather than later. Psychotherapy and various forms of counselling can help you if you are finding it difficult to say ‘I forgive you’, ‘Please forgive me’, ‘Thank you’ and ‘I love you’ to the important people in your life, or if you have regrets and secrets that may cause others pain after your death.
Elaine Kasket is a counselling psychologist and the author of All the Ghosts in the Machine: The Digital Afterlife of Your Personal Data .