Deleting My Sister's Social Media
I became the archivist of a life that ended mid-scroll.
Eleven days after my sister died, her phone reminded her to drink water, and I have never hated an object more gently.
The phone survived the accident. This is the sort of detail that would have made Ritu herself laugh in the wrong register: a scooter, a wet turn near the flyover, a twenty-six-year-old gone before the ambulance crossed two signals... and her phone in her tote bag without a scratch, still at sixty-two percent, still politely nagging her to hydrate.
It came home in a plastic bag with her keys, one earring, and a strip of chewing gum. My parents could not look at the bag. So the phone became mine, the way the worst jobs in a family always slide quietly toward whoever seems to be coping.
I knew her passcode. She had used the same one since school: our old landline number, minus the two. Some vaults are guarded by nostalgia instead of security.
Nobody hands you a manual for this. There is paperwork for the bank, a procedure for the gas connection, a counter at the transport office for the scooter. For the rest of her, the part that lived behind a glass screen, there was only me, sitting cross-legged on her bed at midnight, her phone lighting my face in the dark like a small cold campfire.
Here is what they do not tell you about a dead person's accounts: they stay noisy. A clothing brand offered her twenty percent off for her birthday month. A food app missed her. A game she had abandoned in 2023 announced that her village had been raided. Three separate apps informed her, in cheerful orange, that her streaks had ended. I sat there thinking... yes. That is one way to put it.
The first thing I did was nothing.
For a month I just charged the phone. I would like to pretend this was reverence, but really it was that turning it off felt like a second pronouncement, one that would be my fault. The doctors got the first death. I was not ready to sign off on this one, the little green dot of her, the last place she was still technically reachable.
Then her birthday came, and the internet, which forgets nothing and understands nothing, told four hundred people to wish her.
They did. Balloons, cake emojis, one former classmate writing “big plans this year??” with two question marks that I stared at until they stopped looking like punctuation. My mother got two phone calls from distant aunts who had seen the birthday posts and wanted to know how Ritu was enjoying her day. That evening I applied to memorialise the main accounts, which is a process where you upload a death certificate to a company and a system decides whether your grief is properly formatted.
One platform wanted the certificate, proof of my relationship, and her email address. Another had a form that asked, with no apparent shame, how I would rate my experience afterwards. A third simply never replied, and her profile is still there today, frozen mid-laugh at a wedding in 2024, like a light left on in a house everyone has moved out of.
Nobody tells you that when someone dies mid-scroll, somebody else has to finish the scroll for them.
The real ambush was not the public stuff.
It was the drafts.
I went in looking for a photo my mother wanted, the one from Diwali with the four of us squinting into the fairy lights. I found it. I also found, in her notes app, one hundred and thirty-one entries, and the most recent one was titled, in full Ritu style, “poem?? do not read, especially Neha.”
I am Neha.
I read it.
It was a poem about our grandmother's hands, about how the smell of methi on fingers is a kind of inheritance, and it was good. Not sister-good... Actually good.
There were more. Poems about the flyover she took to work, about a man on the metro reading over her shoulder and getting off at the wrong stop, about me, one about me, seven lines called “Elder Sister as Weather Report,” which said I entered rooms the way October enters a city: without asking, improving everything, pretending not to.
My sister was a poet and had told no one.
She had a job in logistics. She talked in memes. For six years she had been writing in the dark, into a phone, next to grocery lists, and she had shown not one line to a single living person, including the sister she apparently considered weather.
I sat with that for weeks. The unfairness of it had layers. She died at twenty-six, which is unfair in the ordinary, enormous way. But she also died unread, which felt like a separate, smaller death that I, uniquely, had the power to reverse.
So one night in March, phone glow in the dark, her SIM long dead but her words at sixty-two percent forever, I typed out “Elder Sister as Weather Report” and posted it on a community wall for poets, under her name, with one line from me underneath: my sister wrote this and never showed anyone, please read it twice. Then I put the phone face down and lay there with my heart going like a startled pigeon.
Strangers read her.
Strangers read her and replied, not with balloons, with sentences. A man in another city said the methi poem made him call his mother. Someone else pointed me to a page of profiles of writers nobody had heard yet, and I spent a whole night there thinking about how many phones in how many drawers are holding how many Ritus. I began posting one of her pieces every few weeks, curating her the way she curated her photos, ruthlessly, lovingly. When the grief was too loud to sit still, I read what other people had written about memory, all those strangers keeping their own lights on, and it helped in the way a lit window across the street helps: it fixes nothing, it fixes everything.
The deleting, when it finally happened, took one evening. Shopping accounts, food apps, the game with the raided village, gone... gone... gone, each one a tiny clean cut. The big profiles are memorialised now, her name under a word that means the internet has agreed to stop expecting her. I kept exactly two things: the notes app, backed up in three places like a state secret, and her music account, because the algorithm still builds her a playlist every Monday, and some Mondays I play it... and some Mondays it is uncanny, and once, in November, it opened with the song from the Diwali video and I had to sit down on the kitchen floor.
People ask if being the archivist made it harder. It did. It also gave the worst year of my life a shape: someone had to decide what remained of her, and it was me, and I chose her hidden hundred and thirty-one over her public four hundred.
Her phone lives in my desk drawer now, off at last. But every few months I charge it, type the landline number minus two, and sit in its small cold light reading “do not read, especially Neha.”
Especially Neha reads it. Especially Neha will keep reading it.
That is the whole job description, and I did not resign.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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