I press Enter.

Searching for someone in “All Categories” is a modern ritual of resurrection. We believe that if a person has lived, breathed, loved, failed, signed a lease, or posted a complaint about a slow toaster on a forum, the internet will remember. Digital exhaust is the new fossil record. To be absent from it is to risk a second death—not of the body, but of social proof.

I start to imagine her myself. Mensia Francis, born in 1952 in Grenada, immigrated to London in the 1970s, worked as a seamstress, raised two daughters, never trusted computers. She died in 2019, and her daughters wrote her name on a mass-produced funeral pamphlet that never made it online. Or: Mensia Francis, a pseudonym for a whistleblower in the 1980s, who erased every trace of herself after testifying. Or: Mensia Francis, a child who died at three years old, mentioned only in a faded baptismal registry that a flood destroyed.