He was now just a number – a telephone line that could no longer be located. What do you do with the chat history? When someone close to you dies, the first instinct now is to rush to their social media accounts, to catch their last posts, to wonder if there was a final message or tell-tale sign of their impending end. We turn into digital archaeologists, Browse through curated profiles, transforming into investigators of a life lived online. Unlike the physical pages of Anne Frank’s famous diary in the Netherlands, our Kenyan Gen Zs are leaving behind an entire digital universe.

This reality was vividly underscored in the run-up to the June 25th anniversary of last year’s Finance Bill protests. Watching videos of the dramatic moments of June 25th, 2024, I was struck by the reincarnation of fallen comrades like Rex Maasai and Eric Shieni as AI avatars, marching to freedom protests. The names of those lost—Denzel Omondi, Kennedy Onyango, Matthew Njoroge, David Chege, Beasley Kogi—resurfaced, mostly through their personal records, videos of young lives streamed online. In this year’s mobilisation, I came across several accounts of young Kenyans recording their own last testaments, anticipating death by state violence, ensuring their stories remained intact. Some even sent money to a mortician and wrote their own eulogies. Call it the audacity of youth, but self-memorialization is now a digital reality.

This June 25th anniversary reveals a generation manifesting a coordinated digital remembrance. I’ve witnessed a flood of tribute posts, shared photos, and curated video montages set to musical compositions inspired by the Sarafina line, “Freedom is coming tomorrow.” While my generation might perceive this as mere public posturing, I’ve observed the deep empathy and genuine communal memory expressed in this new format.

I found myself recalling with sadness laced with familiarity, the names of the fallen young men from the last protests while scrolling my X timeline. They felt familiar, like neighbourhood kids you saw around but never interacted with. It was distinctly different from the detached sadness I felt staring at names on the Nairobi memorial commemorating the August 1998 US embassy bombing. Even as a first responder who dragged victims from the rubble, that tragedy remains a distant memory, for its personal threads were not retained as they now are in the poignant digital narratives of this new generation.

I remember the story of Brian Chira, a young popular TikToker who died in an unfortunate hit-and-run accident in Nairobi. He was famous for being famous, crafting a scintillating drama that defied a mundane life. Chira’s funeral drew thousands, a testament to the solidarity of young Kenyans who knew his story from his viral reels. His vulnerability and raw honesty, preserved as public records online, resonated deeply with his peers, turning him into a celebrity in death. His name lives on as part of a digital afterlife.

I had a good friend who died earlier this year after a long illness. Despite her medical challenges, she possessed such a positive spirit that death seemed unlikely. In a random conversation, she told me she’d left my contact with a friend to inform me if something happened, asking if I would do the same. The day before, I’d tried calling her with no success. The next morning, a text from her number read: “It’s with sadness that I announce your friend passed on today.” I rushed to her Facebook page. Prominently displayed was a video, live-streamed a year prior, where she spoke of “practicing dying” to be fully present and engaged in life, shedding mindsets that no longer served her. She spoke of inviting grief, sitting with it, allowing it to teach, to let what needs to die, die. In her own way, she had embraced the digital age, creating an active online presence that, even in death, ensured her thoughts and spirit remained accessible.

I grew up at a time when we would regret missing the last conversation, a final phone call. Now, we memorialize in tweets, online posts, and live videos. Those curated profiles become automated tributes. The village is global, and in these reels—even those we perceive as filtered—they tell us the unspoken truth of suffering. 

I recall a rugby player, the life of the party, who spent an evening in a celebratory mood with friends, went home, and took his own life. This brought to mind the poignant Norwich City FC “You Are Not Alone” campaign. The ad showed two friends watching a series of games, one in a state of constant melancholy and the other an exuberant fan, outwardly happy, yet it was the happy fella who was battling deep depression and later died. Check on friends, even those who seem perpetually happy, for escapism and outward extroversion can be a mask.

Comedians, I know, disproportionately face mental health challenges, gifted at pruning pain into art while battling systemic and personal demons. I get the feeling we are witnessing a generation self-medicating their trauma through humor, oscillating between depressive lows and manic creativity. Many comedians, having suffered childhood trauma, use humor as a coping mechanism—a comedic stereotype that deeply mirrors the Gen Z archetype.

Gen Z’s and Millennial lives are fundamentally interwoven with digital platforms. As the most populous generation, they are quietly transforming how we memorialize death, because, in many cases, the digital self feels more authentic, living on long after, almost as if an independent agent. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, notes this generational shift: while my generation treats ChatGPT as a Google substitute, Millennials (and implicitly, Gen Z) use AI as a life advisor, making big decisions only after consulting it. This is the first generation whose entire lives are digitally documented, curated on a cloud. While my peers talk of a digital footprint, they speak in terms of a living map.

This digital immersion explains why understanding Gen Z grief can be difficult. Their grief is instant and often a public performance, measured in heart emojis and “Rest in Peace” comments. They are the generation that came of age during the COVID era of live-streamed funerals. As Brian Chira showed us, there’s a familiar offline communal mobilization that contradicts the intensely individual digital persona. For this generation, their ‘people’ live online but the digital space isn’t separate from real life—it is real life. When they grieve, they’re immediately surrounded by a virtual family that creates a safe space. Their solidarity is innate, and there’s no hurrying them through grief, which frustrates a political class constantly asking, “Aren’t you finished grieving yet?”

Perhaps this is counter to our fragmented communal societies, disrupted by urbanization and modernity: online spaces have re-emerged as a village social center. Every new addition to a funeral fundraising WhatsApp group is a call to share in grief. Much like the family photo album of the past, these temporary online gatherings function as safe grief circles, recreating a digital ubuntu that spins beyond national borders to involve a global digital diaspora responding in real-time.

Having held onto the digital records of a deceased sibling, I considered the merit of a digital will. Yet, accessing a loved one’s intimate digital spaces feels like a violation of privacy. While legal justifications for document transfer exist, it’s a thin line. A curated digital life offers some security but not all our human flaws need to be shared, especially if we lack the capacity to process it. Who becomes our digital death doula? An AI chatbot that retains the record of our dreaded anxieties moments before our exit?

The generational difference is clear, for some have nothing to hide. Feelings are shared instantly—joy, sadness, every emotion placed on the table. My timelines are now filled with curated memories of loss, reminding us that we cannot insist on neat narratives and solemn funerals in the face of raw, profound grief. It is messy, asymmetrical, rarely adhering to protocol. It is the digital version of a riotous funeral, often disrupted by hysteria, and where dignity is discarded and grown women roll in the dust.

When I see a Gen Z video—a letter to a mother, telling her to remember them kindly if they die in the streets, published online—I see the lure of digital immortality. For a generation raised on virtual worlds and digital avatars, what stops an AI recreation of a loved one, incorporating their packaged digital lifetime, living happily on, in a digital afterlife? Could I have an AI ghost, a chatbot speaking in the voice of the departed, constantly checking on me when I feel unseen in the real world?

The digital realm is more than a tool; it has become part of our very being, a living archive of our laughter, tears, and profound connections. This redefines the “living dead,” as AI now offers a technological illusion of immortality, a new kind of spiritual connection. We have front-row seats to a new generation of digital death doulas, pioneering communal mourning and legacy building in this new world.

To surrender our digital afterlife to the whims of algorithms and distant corporate policies means relinquishing a vital part of our human story. For this reason, we have much to learn from digital natives, our Gen Zs. The digital terrain is their home ground. Like rebels who knew forests and rivers, Gen Z operates with native fluency in digital spaces. They weaponize social media algorithms to amplify marginalized voices, turning platforms designed for consumption into tools for revolution. They map power structures, expose corruption, and share knowledge via infographics. Just as anti-colonial resistance movements repurposed geography, Gen Z repurpose tech, rattling governments with floods of hashtags and using memes, parody and satire to erode legitimacy.

Gen Z operates in terrain where authorities struggle, often leading the state to resort to coercion, threats, and violence. Yet, this generation is acutely aware that the consequences of their defiance are real; the list of activists who have faced digital harassment, imprisonment, and death is mounting. Compounding this, they operate in spaces that can be summarily shut down, with tech platform gatekeepers often complicit with the state.

These youngsters, who have navigated the digital landscape since birth, possess the unique power to redefine what ‘death’ means online. While my generation worries about password access, they are curating empowering narratives. This collective might build us a culturally relevant digital legacy, populated with human-curated digital capsules for loved ones.

The medium might have changed, but the human need for connection across time remains constant. Whether whispered by a village grandmother, etched in a photo album, or stored in the cloud, the desire to be remembered, to have our story echo beyond the veil of life, is immutable.

Gen Z are our digital-era resistance fighters, challenging oppression by mobilizing their numbers to use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. Perhaps, in this digital age, what we’re witnessing in Kenya with the Gen Z-led mass action is the defiant measure of a life lived with fierce intentionality. It’s not just a struggle; it’s the audacious public documentation of a human story that refuses to die, echoing powerfully long after the actors have passed into the digital realms of the living dead.

P.S. This reflection on grief in the digital age is drawn from my reflections on the ones we lost and meditations on grief, and healing. It forms part of a series of insights drawn from my upcoming book, Strength and Sorrow, where I delve deeper into these universal experiences and the pathways to finding healing amidst loss.