I knew that looking through my father’s phone was a dangerous game. I had been hunting for passwords, account information, clues to understanding his sprawling financial setup that I was now responsible for as the executor of his estate. To sift through someone’s camera roll, text messages, and Google Search history is a novel and modern tier of intimacy — violatory and porous with context gaps.
There were landmines I knew to dodge, scroll past, avert my eyes from, close out of — like anything that began to resemble sexting. Yet there was one landmine I needed, desperately, to detonate.
I started typing my own name into the search bar almost reflexively. Deep down, a naive and childish part of me stood, fists clenched, eyes shut hard like seconds after blowing out birthday cake candles…wishing, wishing, wishing.
✦
I hadn’t thought about my father very much in the two years between our last conversation and his death. No explosive fight, not much of a relationship to rupture. He had barely been a father; I was barely a daughter. I rounded it down to zero for us.
Then, my dad’s employer contacted me because he hadn’t shown up to work for a week. I called for a police wellness check. The police called me back. The police called me back. I called my mom, I called the coroner, I called the funeral home, I called the estate lawyer, I called another estate lawyer because the first one gave me a retainer estimate I thought was too high but I also wasn’t sure because I had never hired any sort of lawyer before.
My mom lived 3,000 miles away and was (is? Does divorce transcend death?) divorced from him. My brothers were 19 and 16. My uncle, his brother, lives in China. It became clear that I, living an hour away from his house and possessions and now-corpse, would end up in charge.
✦
What, exactly, was I looking for when I searched my own name in my dead dad’s phone?
On some level, I was wishing for the reveal that my father did love me and care about me and that he regretted his behavior. That he had spent the intervening years wringing his hands over how he could redeem himself. That he too had been grappling with the ways that alcoholism and cultural barriers had complicated the already messy terrain of a father-daughter relationship. He would acknowledge how he had alternated between mean and negligent, and lay out his plan on how he would be different. The cheesiest version of me wanted to find a draft apology letter, an anonymous submission to an advice column, an expression of concern for my well-being.
The niggling “he’s your dad and he loves you and he’s trying his best” that older relatives had pulled me aside to whisper throughout my whole childhood came roaring back. I often wondered whether I was abnormally cold and detached for not trying harder with him. Was it up to me to have offered him more chances? Would his phone reveal some effort I could’ve made, a missed opportunity for connection?
I wanted a taste of “normal” grief, of wishing we had more time, instead of this sense of utter apathy. I felt like I was misdirecting people when I told them my dad died and I saw their faces twist in sympathy, when they automatically suggested that he loved me and would be missed. I was not following a standard script. If his phone had been full of apologies and attempts to reconcile, at least I would be placed in the legible role of remorseful daughter.
✦
My search yielded two results. I could almost hear my deflating ego. One was a complaint to my younger brother, somehow couched in a broader grievance about how hard it is to be a man in this world. He was angry that I had stopped speaking to him even though he paid half of my college tuition. I didn’t know that was the sticker price for “Daughter Still Talks To You.”
The second result, a text to my mom, was more vexing: “Do you approve Anson’s profile picture on LinkedIn? She is not blonde, people of all races dislike fakes.”
The text was from a few years ago, when I had invested nine hours and several hundred dollars into bleaching my naturally black hair. Did he think I had specifically photoshopped my LinkedIn photo because I thought being blonde would improve my career prospects and conceal my Chinese-ness? Why suggest the cross-racial uniting nature of disliking fakes? I even googled “People of all races dislike fakes” to see if it was some niche tagline or dogwhistle I was unaware of.
The illogic of his text was jarring yet validating of my perception of him: unpredictably indignant and politically incoherent. Later, I’d find a cardboard box in his garage full of custom novelty t-shirts ostensibly mocking the Malaysia Airlines flight that went missing in 2014.
✦
I clash with family members over my lack of forgiveness for my father. In his favor is the fact that he was the breadwinner in our house, providing for us financially before and after my parents divorced and he moved out. He bought what ended up being my first DSLR camera, which I used for ten years, including at the beginning of my professional photography career. He loved travel, did a lot of it for work, and accrued a bounty of airline points. He took me on trips to Paris, London, and Istanbul. He always had a nonfiction audiobook on, a solemn deep-voiced male narrator recounting history facts about some war. I am probably curious about the world because he was.
In the other column, the one I find myself gesturing wildly at, questioning if I’m petty or exaggerating, is how he would clomp around when he was drunk, which was often. I can recall being in elementary school and scrambling to find a way to hide a bottle of his liquor, believing this could keep us all safe. My parents’ split was precipitated by a domestic violence incident. When I needed eye surgery, my dad called to berate and blame me for my retinal tear. The concept of seeking emotional support, comfort, or advice from one’s father is completely foreign to me.
In his phone, I had hoped to find a shred of permission to forgive him. I had feared that I would find cruelty. What I found was the same father I remembered — and the understanding that his death wouldn’t rewrite the story into something saccharine. When I grieve, I am not missing my father, the one who looks at a photo of his estranged daughter and thinks about how people of all races dislike fakes. I am missing the father I never had and will always want.
Standing there with his phone in my hand, I couldn’t locate any more anger. There would be no redemption arc, but I had been released from the fear that I wasn’t living up to my part in that nicer, cleaner story. I found the passwords I needed and continued sorting through his accounts.
Anson’s essay got us thinking about the ever-expanding archive we leave behind when we die. Not just photo albums and shoeboxes full of concert ticket stubs (from before concert tickets were QR codes, remember??), but search histories, texts, and ::cringes involuntarily:: the email drafts folder.
In All the Ghosts in the Machine, cyberpsychologist Elaine Kasket explores this “digital afterlife” where our messages, photos, and metadata become a kind of ongoing story — one that can comfort, unsettle, or complicate mourning depending on who’s reading.
And for an even more unsettling angle, this piece from Nature dives into the rise of “griefbots,” AI versions of the dead that can keep chatting long after someone is gone. We understand the temptation, but we’ve already seen that episode of Black Mirror, so we know this won’t end well…
