I am knee-deep in the messy middle of a memoir about my late son, Elliot, and his absence that never goes away.
Last week, I wrote about my role as executor of my firstborn’s estate and my struggle to access his Amazon Web Services (AWS) dashboard. It was his techie side gig. The very next day, AWS wrote to me. It had been seven years since our last exchange.
Grappling with Elliot’s digital remains has presented many hurdles, but AWS was by far the worst one on this dystopian frontier.
The two emails I received a couple of days ago stated that their “attempt to verify the default payment method was unsuccessful.” I recalled how the AWS overlords had required me to open my own account when I contacted them in September 2018. They instructed me to post weekly reminders to customer service to somehow keep Elliot’s inactive account alive—while I secured the necessary court documents to prove my heirship.
This was highly irregular, as all his other accounts required only the death certificate.
I had forgotten all about this shell account, EllaBiz, but I remembered the excruciating pain it produced. After a year of check-ins, court delays, legal documents, and escalating expenses, the official missive, dated August 14, 2019, informed me that “the paperwork was successful,” but “Elliott’s (misspelled) account was suspended in August 2018 and all resources deleted in November 2018.”
I was livid. How could this be?
I had obeyed their instructions to the letter for a year. There was no acknowledgment that Elliot was deceased. No recognition that AWS had sent me on a wild legal goose chase that allowed the clock to run out. No apparent understanding of what they had erased or accountability for their heart-crushing deception.
He was dead. He couldn’t pay them. They knew that.
I felt like Dorothy with the witch’s broom. How I wished for the virtual equivalent of a bucket of water. As a side note, this was pre-A.I. The torture was all human.
And the grief was multi-layered. Elliot managed my business domain account, so I lost invaluable data and history, still profoundly triggering. My estate attorney, Ellen, and I fought back and demanded restoration—for a while. She wrote in a response: “Dead people do not pay bills. Probate actions take time.”
We also knew that nothing on the internet ever goes away, but Amazon’s resistance was impenetrable. There was no relief in sight, and I knew the legal path would have been gutting.
Even the mention of AWS still ignites every nerve ending in my body, so this recent rogue appearance in my email box was jarring. I dismissed the alerts as an eerily timed phishing scam, but I also felt a dash of Elliot in the mix. A combination of vintage ire and unexpected grace sank into my tired heart.
Later in the week, I encountered a word on Substack for this kind of high-voltage moment—something grief has been teaching me for years: apophenia, the tendency to perceive meaning in random connections, patterns, and relationships.
I must have an acute case of apophenia.
It even sounds like a rare condition that requires immediate attention.
Could apophenia be the algorithm of grief?
It’s the narrative engine driving my memoir. I’ve been viewing my entire story through the lens of apophenia—coincidences, signs, and Twilight Zone-esque anomalies. Pareidolia is part of it, too: the age-old human urge to find meaningful images in random, vague, or ambiguous patterns. Like animals in the clouds or the man in the moon.
In grief, think of the blob of mud on the sidewalk that looks like a heart or the numbers 11:11 on a clock. For me, it’s jet trails that form sprawling “Es” in the sky. I look for them now, even ask for them, casting my gaze up into the rich, blue heavens. Though bittersweet, they are micro-bursts of joy that always surprise and delight me.
Noticing signs is how I survive.
And what’s wrong with that? What does it matter if they are not really “Es” made out of jet exhaust or cloud wisps? Grief has taught me that meaning does not always require an explanation. Sometimes it asks only that I notice.
However, some folks in my life have limited tolerance for such woo-woo.
“Look,” I say, pointing up at the frothy white lines as we walk. “It’s a wink from Mr. E.”
The response is often heavy silence or a nervous laugh that suggests that they are wondering if I am off my meds. I get it. It takes suspension of disbelief to go there. But if I see the significance, it is there.
The two emails arrived the day after I wrote the chapter about the AWS muck. Something about them seemed real. I asked my trusty assistant, ChatGPT, what he thought, and he suggested I compare the data carefully.
That’s what I did.
I took a deep breath and logged back into the scene of the Amazon crime. I found my dormant account, EllaBiz, the same account number listed in the email, and the inactive credit card.
The emails were legit.
A cold shudder peeled down my spine that made this discovery more than a random coincidence. Seven years ago, AWS had erased the account that contained pieces of Elliot but preserved the very account I created while trying to save them.
Random, maybe.
Synchronistic, yes.
A message from Elliot? Not sure.
Meaningful, absolutely.
Now, I look up above and find Elliot in jet exhaust. I open my computer and find him in the ghost account Amazon preserved after deleting the one that mattered. One pattern is written across the sky; the other is buried inside a machine.
I cannot prove that either one contains him, but both return him to me.
And for an instant, he is here.
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