It was raining outside and I was walking around my room doing calisthenics.  Most of it was marching in a circle and grunting unintelligible drill sergeant commands.  I didn’t do any jumping jacks because I thought it might disrupt the people on floor four, but I did drop down and knock out twenty, high quality pushups.

When I stood up, I caught my reflection in the mirror.  I saw myself marching in a circle and I had the sudden realization that I was going to die.

Maybe I’d been inside for too long, or maybe it was a moment of clarity, but that’s the message I got from my reflection.  I was going to die and there wasn’t anything anyone could do about it. 

I wasn’t going to die right then.  My heart was beating fast and my forehead was sweating from the pushups and all that marching, I wasn’t currently dying, but I knew I would – sooner or later.

The thought, that idea of unavoidable death, stared back at me from the mirror.  I had two reactions to it.  The first was, “what the fuck am I marching for?”  I remember that thought very clearly. Thinking about the certainty of death, everything can seem futile.  It just so happens that marching and making pretend drill sergeant noises, alone, inside your apartment, falls into that category.

There was a notebook at the foot of my bed.  This sparked the second thought.  “What about this?”  I have a dozen of these notebooks.  They’re all filled with notes, and drawings of dicks, and ideas, and thoughts, and stories.  I started thinking about the documents on my computer, unfinished, finished, lots of shit stories, passwords.  These notes, a lot of them don’t mean anything to anyone but me, but some aren’t total shit. 

I have them everywhere.  They’re on my phone, saved in emails, unsent email drafts.  If I die – when I die – no one will be able to decipher any of it.  Passwords won’t even allow them to get to most of it.

My passwords are all the same, so maybe someone will get lucky.

Then the futile feeling came back.  It came back the way chili-cheese fries come back if you immediately start doing cartwheels in the parking lot of The Hat. 

Who gives a fuck about any of it?  Even if someone could get into my computer and access my email, who would want to sort through it all?

I started crossing people off the list.  Mom – nope.  Friends – they hardly read my shit now, and I’m still alive.  The truth of the matter is, there aren’t a lot of people I would want looking through my stuff, so the process of crossing off everyone was pretty quick.  Twelve or thirteen seconds, tops.

Then I started taking it personally.  I stopped marching and I stood at attention.  I looked at myself in the mirror.

Some of this is could be of value.  I’m not sure how, or why – but maybe.  I never told anyone the coordinates of where I buried that dead bird which I accidently killed with a broom in the fourth grade.  I have few stories that might be worth reading.  There are seven, brutal “fuck you” letters saved in my email drafts.   I’d want those delivered to the appropriate parties.  I’ve got a Netflix account and subscriptions to a few digital magazines that someone could make use of.  If I die at the beginning of the month, someone could get a free 29 days.

Most of it my notes are terrible, derogatory, and offensive, but some of them could be useful.  Maybe.  So I did some research.

As usual, the internet is a beautiful, innovative, horrifying place, depending on what’s in your search bar.  One of the beautiful parts is a service called “Deathswitch”.

Of course someone came up with a solution to my problem before I started marching myself into madness.  Humans get heaven or hell, or probably neither, and everything else gets ‘Deathswitch’ - the digital afterlife.

If you die, and Deathswitch will know you’re dead because you haven’t responded to their regularly scheduled emails, Deathswitch fires off some messages.  What’s in those messages?  That parts up to you. 

I’m not fucking around, it’s a real website.

“Don’t die with secrets that need to be free.”  That’s the creepy tagline on their homepage. 

See, someone else was marching around their room and had the exact same realization.  Set up an account and Deathswitch will tell people where that dead bird is buried.  Tell your mom you love her one last time.  Tell your husband that the redheaded kid wasn’t his after all – “sorry about that.”

You can give people your bank information and pin numbers and whatever, but who cares about that when you’re dead.

If you sign up, Deathswitch lets you send one message to one recipient for free.  I did.  You’ll have to wait to see who gets the lucky, postmortem email.  The other option on the website is signing up for twenty bucks a year.  That allows you to send up to thirty messages to ten different people.  That’s a reasonable amount of last goodbyes. 

Make them creepy.  Make people cry.  Give them your Netflix account.  Whatever you want.

We’re all going to die one day, but with Deathswitch we get one final opportunity to say, “Fuck you” or  “Please erase my Google history.”