In the week before my spouse passed, they gave me access to their BitWarden vault and gave me their current and past cell phones, which I used after they passed to:

- Update and lock or delete all of their social media, chat, and forums accounts, both personal/locked down, professional/public, and hobby-related. This was the primary way that many of their extended network found out about their death, including people not on social media who found out through their offline social connections.

- Access their contacts to organize memorials with all of the close contacts they had that I didn't — former coworkers, friends from places they lived before we met, extended family I didn't have contact info for, etc.

- Respond to text messages and social media posts from people who hand't yet heard and tried to reconnect with them in the months after their death.

- Update, identify, and closed any shared accounts, financial and otherwise, that didn't already automatically pass over to me. This was especially useful for their 401k, which blocked preferred forms of rollover disbursement into another account unless I had information I could get only via access to their web account.

- Transfer their website domains, some of which needed to persist for various reasons, to my domain management account, and forward their email addresses to my accounts.

- Deactivate their LinkedIn account, which required an inordinate amount of legal action — such as submitting legal proof of small estate probate, which even my state office told me not to get because it was unnecessary in our situation.

- Access utility accounts that were under their name and pay bills that were associated with my spouse's credit cards, pending the provider cutting over administration to me, which in some cases took weeks or required deleting the account with their credentials.

- Download their email, photos, documents, tax returns (they filed our taxes some years), recipes, and other digital products like licenses and Bandcamp music, from cloud services, online storefronts, and encrypted storage.

- Update our pets' microchip registrations, and vet and boarding contacts, to add me or make me the primary contact.

While my partner's illness had been terminal and treated for months, their decline and passing was much more sudden than either of us expected, occurring over the course of about three days. We were barely able to update their advance directive accordingly to the new diagnosis before they were physically and mentally incapable of doing so. If we hadn't handed off the broader pieces of their phone and BitWarden vault first, everything would've been much more difficult.

Since their passing, this access has been useful for prosaic things, like finding proof-of-purchase details for appliances they bought using their email account or phone number in order to get warranty service, or finding a book with library tags on the spine in their belongings and checking their account to see if they had checked it out so I could return it.

But there are lots of things I don't strictly need in my spouse's digital estate that I often find that I'm happy to have. I have dozens of conversations, voice messages, photos, and videos that we only shared via email early on in our relationship that weren't saved in other places, some of which existed only in their account. Our engagement photos were sent as archives in emails from the photographer to my partner, who hadn't forwarded that email to me because I was looking at them over their shoulder, and it included many that we hadn't added to our cloud storage. They owned a guitar that I hadn't known much about until I read through the emails of their acquiring it, and realized it was rarer and more valuable than I had anticipated by a considerable amount. They had most of the contact with the artisan who crafted our wedding rings, and I was able to use those contacts in my partner's email to reconnect with them and have them refashioned into a keepsake when I was ready to remove mine.

One day about a year and a half after they passed, while looking in one of their old phones for details about one of their business ventures they'd had before we met, I found a random folder with a solitary audio file in it. It was a clip of them singing a song a capella that they had apparently written in a car for about two minutes. I cried for the rest of the day that I found it, and since then I listen to it almost every week.