I saw my own life reflected in those files, and if they survived then I was surviving too. But they didn't survive, and in fact I let them die in the most miserable way. When I left my job, I kept meaning to wipe them off the hard drive, sweeping them all neatly onto a Zip disk that I would carry around with me for the next decade, perhaps for the rest of my life. But I never got around to doing it. I abandoned them, those little linguistic bits of life, and finally the computer was purged without my knowledge and sent back to Florida, where the main office of my former company is located.
Some information is meant to die, to commit suicide in our absence.
But more often there's the hallmark of information suicide, which is to say that there's nothing at all. You go to the alleged URL only to get some anonymous error message, or a redirect to the ISP main page. When information dies, it doesn't leave monuments. And although people try to leave monuments for each other and themselves, the fact is that death often works like the delete button. I think human suicide is more often than not a kind of information suicide, a wish to wipe out the emails and image files and text documents that live in our minds long after they are useful or relevant.