When I felt particularly tortured, I opened my dad’s last voicemail to me and listened to it. His voice reaffirmed that I was a human experiencing honest grief rather than a dead pixel on a distant screen, passively crying over the cruelty of some algorithm. In the voicemail he thanked me for the gift basket of bagels, lox, and whitefish salad that I’d had delivered to him for his birthday. He was pleased to have received it and didn’t know he was going to be dead in a month.

For weeks I avoided checking emails, believing that if I never looked at the many requests from lawyers and creditors, they wouldn’t be real. My father might have approved of my self-imposed digital exile. He had joined the online revolution haltingly and reluctantly. He never quite learned how to type. He couldn’t text. He used only one app with any enthusiasm, and it was the chess app that his friend David had installed on his phone so that they could maintain their decades-long rivalry over long distances. Email was barely on his radar. But one day I opened Gmail and searched my email history for his name anyway, even though I knew I wouldn’t find much. It was the sort of thing I did often in the early days of my father’s death, fracking for his presence in the deepest and most unlikely crevices of my life.

As expected, I found only about 10 emails between us in as many years of Gmail use. The revelation was not in anything I read but in the mere typing of his name—an icy wave of relief splashing me in the face. How good it felt to write his name for no reason, in a place that only I could see, and not on some piece of paperwork related to his death or in response to some well-wisher’s post on Facebook. It was like charging a magical sigil. I’d never been one of those writers who attached fetishistic significance to the physical act of writing (or to books themselves, or paper). But I finally understood how those writers felt. Writing to my father, I realized, was a charmed act. It didn’t summon him, but it raised the friendly shadow of him in the room; that was something.

I began writing him emails. I didn’t send them at first. Typing his email address into the recipient bar was enough to conjure up his listening presence. For months I transcribed the hostile anguish in my head into emails to my father, which I would then seal off with the addition of his email address and save in my drafts folder. It was the high school diary, unfiltered. He would never find out how it ended now; it felt good to “tell” him.

The first time I pressed “send,” it was by accident, and I was horrified. I was worried not that someone would receive and read the email, but that the recipient address would bounce back a message that the account had been deactivated.

I stared at my inbox for a minute, waiting for the inevitable. It never happened. The email address was still active.

So I continued the ritual, except now I sent those long-winded emails out. I wrote to my father anytime I needed him. In my letters I tried to talk myself around to whatever he would have said to me, hoping I could reverse-engineer the advice he might have given me. Then I pressed send, which never stopped being thrilling—I’d sidestepped the finality of death and found a plane where my father could thrive unchallenged. I put disclaimers at the beginning of every email: Hey, if you can somehow read this, please ignore it; hey, I don’t think anyone’s checking this email, but if you are then please just delete without reading; I’m lonely, I’m grieving, I miss my father, nothing to see here. But nobody ever responded.