What happens when you REALLY die?

The thread about SL 'dying' makes me wonder what actually happens when we die in real life, er real death. I don't mean 'is there a heaven?' I mean what happens to the interrupted SL business, property, items on sales in shops, flows of money, group membership etc. I remember a thread which said you could include SL-related instuctions in your real will - I bet most people haven't! - but it seems to me that even if you have, by the time anything happened about that your group might have been wound up, land repossessed, etc, all by automatic process. And your loved ones might never find out. Never. After all, nobody except you knows who they are.
Does anybpdy know the answer to this from personal experience? Well, not actually 'personal' obviously. If there really are 10million plus members (I know, I know, but that's not the point), then probably 100,000+ of them really have died by now, leaving half a million puzzled friends.

It's not even something I worry about. SL would be the LEAST of my families concerns if I died....and I could care less what happens to my 'stuff'. The only thing that would matter is the friends I've made here....and how to let them know. That's the difficult and sad part. Right now there is noone in world that knows me personally IRL....so if something were to happen.... yes, it would leave many puzzled people.
For that reason.....I spose it would be wise to leave some kind of request to have someone notify my SL friends should the unthinkable occur......but like probably everyone else here...I haven't done anything to prepare for such an event. I hope it's not something my loved ones have to deal with for a long time.

I have, however, had friends unexpectedly drop off SL......I still see them listed but haven't heard from them in months....it does sort of make me wonder, but I choose to think their RL has simply become too demanding or interesting to be bothered with SL. I hope that is the case.

Soon enough my brother and sister may be joining me here anyway....which would be an absolute blast.....and it would be a wonderful RL world connection to this place.

My sl land/inventory etc would, as someone else said, be the least of my families worries & I don't own anything of any value. I'd like three of my SL friends, who are my family here, to know .. but i'm sure if they wanted to they'd be able to find out. I'd only worry if one of those three disappeared & that doesn't bear thinking about.

eventually your tier will go unpaid, gov linden will repossess your land, your objects will get autoreturned, as a result of having a negative balance your account will be suspended, you will vanish from search, vanish from the groups, and will be forgotten.

I remember reading about this but i probably have bits of it wrong. So this is the gist of it.

LL is not adverse to transferal of accounts (Yahoo on the other hand will will not let anyone have access to the account upon report of the users death). You can put it in your will what should happen to your account. As long as it is allowed by the TOS it shouldn't be a problem. You can't require LL to do anything only request; of course if it is something that doesn't require the personal attention of LL it shouldn't be a problem (closing the account for example is something that can be done without involving LL personally, it's an automated task that can be initiated and concluded without any personal involvement from LL).

When a community leader passed away several months ago, there was an inworld memorial service, and a friend realized the number of friends she had lost to RL passing was growing, so decided to build a memorial, a lovely building with their pictures and date of death (numbering four iirc).

Of course, with the tragic passing of one of our larger designers, their partner is carrying on.

Ironically, going back to the original post, why would groups dissolve? Without anyone there to leave them? If the person sold products enough to cover the cost of land and automatically paid, the account might be self-sufficient beyond the passing of the RL person, especially a non-premium account. Customer service requests would go unanswered of course, but it's not like someone needs to be there to replenish products in vendors, and classifieds auto-renew...

Since it takes action to leave land, close and remove stores, leave groups, etc, I'd imagine there could possibly be a virtual legacy continuing far beyond their RL existence...

when you really die, i think you are then just really dead... at which point you won't really care about SL. unless you are a ghost, and haunt the game until that gypsy psychic nutjob sylvia brown tells you to go into the light.

this could explain the hair up the butt phenomenum, as well as the perpetual ruthing.

I had someone tell me not too long ago that he wanted me to take care of his stuff in the event that he died, and that he had written these instructions into his will. If he went without contact for a few months then I'd receive instructions.

Now, I personally think THIS particular person was full of it. Within a month he supposedly had a life threatening issue put him in hospital (ok I believed that), had to go at short notice to see his friend's mother with him (hmmmm ... well it COULD have been true ... but my instinct to ask what her name was yielded the interesting result of "I don't know" when this was apparently a friend from WAY WAY back) and funnily enough the very tiniest teenyweeniest little scrap of respect went when told he had to be with someone "becauseshe was in a car crash and was in a coma".

Nothing to do with lying through the hole in his derriere and selling his venue, then. And he wondered why I really didn't give a monkeys, having decided weeks before that I was being lied to and letting it run it's course.

However ... this makes me think. I may well put instructions into a will cos it's high time I wrote one in the first place.

When I die, you all will vanish like a dream. Sorry about that.

*forces the sun to midnight and rezzes a campfire*

Gather around and I shall tell you a tale...

It was Halloween 2002 and Ruth was working late into the night at the offices of Linden Lab. The rain was coming down hard and she wondered if she would ever get home. She sighed and hung her head, the avatar code was coming along she knew but it was nowhere near ready for the demo with the investors the next day. Everyone else had gone home, her part was all that was left to be done. To add to that the rain was dampening her spirit, in the distance she could hear the the claps of thunder getting louder as the storm outside worsened. The building boomed as a strike hit nearby and the lights flickered but her tapping on the keyboard didn't even falter. The next strike was much closer, the lights blazed brilliant white and burst, the transformer outside exploded, the fragments going in all directions and the percussion wave blowing the windows in.

They never found her body, only the smoldering remains of her chair and melted keyboard. The meeting with the investors couldn't be postponed, they needed the money badly. The code seemed to work though.

They say she lives on in the code. When you stumble upon some incomplete part of her task, a bit of her comes alive and fills the void, forever trapped until the code is done.

You didn't see me when I was born Strife. My name should have BEEN Ruth. Or, Bernard Manning. There wasn't much to choose between the two.

Ooooh scary! The ghost of Ruth lives on in all of us, especially bad teleports.

LOL nice to see your creative side coming out

And they make you itch! Lil buggers!

Ah, barring a server accident, banishment or financial difficulties, I do believe Des is immortal.

So the passing of the human component could probably be covered with some landbot code, and maybe a little bit of fancy, expensive but not impossible AI...

Sort of like the estate of Marilyn Monroe or Elvis, except you'll still be able to talk to Des!

Worst comes to worst, Des could hire a team of human advisors and just watch financial performance...

...what is this 'death' you speak of?

Now consider something *truly* terrifying: a 'clone' of Des, or more, unleashed on the same grid... now *that* would be something to worry about.

In October 2004 i was involved in a nasty Road Traffic Accident.
http://www.incony.org/webpics/NSRTA1.jpg
http://www.incony.org/webpics/NSRTA2.jpg
http://www.incony.org/webpics/NSRTA3.jpg
Fortunately the Sugar Beet Truck was empty, when all the wheels on one side ran over the cab of my van. The front Axle was taken off the truck on collision, the photos show it minus that..

I broke/ fractured my neck in three places,the pictures show the van after they raised the roof and seat to get me out.. i was semi conscious.. the roof steel had wrapped around my head, it probably saved me.. i couldnt move.

They put me in a drug induced coma, tracheoctomy..and fixed me... a steel cage bolted to my head secured to my shoulders, straps around my chest... i was in a coma for a month. and it took three months before i could pick up the pieces of my life.. literally.

So... whats the relevance...? in an instant my everyday life stopped..everything one does and takes for granted doesnt happen..
you do not come home...
bills are not paid..
e mail isnt answered
telephone calls are not taken..replied to
credit card bills are not paid...
The cat isnt fed...
no one can access your bank account...
your electricity and gas and phone bills, your mortgage maybe..are not paid.. everything stops.. why..? because everything you do in modern life is protected by passwords.. entry codes.. and unless someone you trust has access to that info.. then no one can access your life and take care of stuff..

At the time.. i was effectivly dead.. lost in the depths , no one could say what i would be like when they they allowed me back.. would my dear old brain work? having been trashed against the back of my head, dead brain cells... would my body work? could i move even?

i was very very lucky.. when i was allowed out of the drug induced coma, it was some experience to find oneself in such a position.. full of tubes and pipes.. i couldnt feel anything, one side of my body wouldnt work at all, everything numb...it was like a dream.. not a good one.. i had no memory.. no knowledge of what had happened, it was all gone.. at least a weeks worth of memory.. coherrence and realisation trashed.. my head was in chaos.. i couldnt think straight, couldnt speak properly.. was like one gets after too much alcohol..

but in another month i could walk (kinda) again..the feeling came back bit by bit.. they unbolted the cage.. my head worked.. i could reason again..
another month they let me home.. and.. over the next year.. i retook my driving test.. my exams.. got my job back.. and here i am.. my memory is the only thing ive never resolved.. i loose short term memory.. it comes back.. but , in the middle of a sentence im speaking, the next word just isnt there... like someone wiped the slate clean as i am reading it..

the point i make is that one needs to be sure that stuff is in place to take care of the loss of one.. that moment comes to us all.. i know now what would have happened if i had not recovered..

As an aside, when my dear father died, the gravestone in the churchyard that holds the name of those cremated, has a shallow area in the stone beneath his name.. because the engraver made a mistake.. it was my name he put there.. how do i know..? i walked into the graveyard to see the stone.. and there was my name.. how many folks have seen their name on a stone in a real church graveyard..? how many folks have visited death, and come back... ?

ive been there done that.. i do not recommend it as an excercise.. make sure someone can access whats left..

Goodness. You had a lucky return to life Incony - you remind me that the questions I was wondering about apply to real life just as much as second life. The key lesson is clearly about making arrangements that someone you trust knows your passwords and locations.

But the difference is still there isn't it? In real, my family and friends and colleagues know who I really am, and where I live, and in the event of a disaster could find a way of getting the information out. In SL nobody knows who I really am, or where I live, and in principle telling anybody my password would be a breach of the rules (not that that would matter). It IS an awful thought that if you don't see someone in SL you just don't know if they got fed up and went off without saying anything, or have died - and there isn't any way to find out, and you might never know.

I can't say I lie awake at night worrying about how to leave the 'objects' and 'snapshots' in a will. But many of us spend a real life's worth of time and attention to real friends and partners in SL. Surely it ought to be easier to think through what to do about that?

OK, 'it's just a game' - but then we find it's more than just a game.

Hal (who started this thread) is my SL partner and is NOT as young as me - he is 66 and I am 29. So - I think - he thinks of his mortality in the real world because of his age. This morning, I said to him that when we die maybe there are places like "Riverworld" - the Jose Philip Farmer series of books. Maybe we create our world "heavens" in virtual realities. Either way, my bank deposit box has a letter ready to inform Hal if I die. I lead a pretty wild real life and can't expect to grow old bones. Hopefully, in real I will die fast and die happy!
I think if we maintain relationships here it is incumbent upon us to inform our partners in the event of our death (I hate the word "passing". Yes, I know it is a game but people are real who type here and Hal is a REAL man - and a decent one.
For those of you who perhaps have doubts about all this, I have a sl tale to tell about the lack of care or consideration. I was once friends with a man (in SL) who claimed a decent job in real world, a caring kinda job and I was impressed by his sense of humanity. Anyway, one night, we were talking and he suddenly said "BRB" and went slack on me. Then minutes passed. Many many minutes. I was okay coz I sorted out my inventory. He never came back. Few days later, he IMed me and said "Sorry Jig, my phone went and I got into a great chat with a REAL friend." I have never spoken to him again.
Well, Hal is a real friend. And I hope you all have a real friend here also. Let's be sure our REAL friends know what happens to us if something unfortunate happens. We don't have to let our partners / lovers / little souls know who we really are, but if we die, we should be prepared to let people know.
By the way, Hal, stop all these morbid thoughts!!!!

Be interesting if you could impart your brain waves, memory and personality into your sl avatar before shaking off the mortal coil I suppose barring any erasure of data youd become immortal.

Or maybe with lag it would just seem like youd become immortal....

My best friend and I made an agreement that if one of us dies, the other gets her inventory. My husband is in SL, so no worries on anyone being informed, and I don't own a business, so no customer service issues are going to come up.

Sarah Nerd raised this issue a while back, there are assets here, the tax man pokes his nose in so you should be able to leave those assets to someone. If I'm being forced to pay VAT. that's a recognition that there is something here of value, I damn well should be able to leave my SL business to someone else.

Dearly Darlings,

My RL/SL Sister has my password and I've tucked SL into the will. My Husband is also here but he still has not figured out how to change clothes...hence I keep him in kilts and the sister will handle it all. I would hope that those who chose to remember me before I'm wiped from this universe would think kindly and make some sort of Donation to one of the Charity groups I'm involved with:

Princeton University
The Menaul School
Take The Lead

or Purebred Rescue

You all have a lovely day!

Ever Yours,

Mrs. Showdog Tiger

How long before someone is bumped off by the beneficiary of an sl will I wonder

@Jig & Hal: That is one cool SL partnership! Let's hope you don't have to think of what happens "after" for a long time! (And Hal-my dad is 63 and still hasn't figured out how to walk properly in SL...he's afraid of even his MOBILE phone... ) Sod age differences!

I don't intend to die. Dying is not in my plans. However, I have told my daughters to get online and contact my friends, in case this (which is not in my plans) actually happens.

coco