When my mom makes our family Christmas cookies, she no longer needs a recipe. Instead, we stand side by side in the kitchen while I follow her muscle memory, rolling Russian tea cakes in powdered sugar and pressing the bottoms of forks into the dough balls for chocolate crinkle cookies. But my mom is Type A to a t: She’s scanned the pages of step-by-step instructions and keeps them organized on her Google Drive, just in case. And she’s already made sure that, when she dies—whenever that awful day might come—the folder containing all of these recipes will get sent directly to me.

Technically, the cookie recipes will be part of a larger posthumous digital delivery, arriving in my inbox courtesy of Google’s Inactive Account Manager. They will reach me three months after my mom’s departure—a time frame she selected after doing a regular review of her privacy settings earlier this year (like I said, Type A). With the cookie recipes will come the rest of her Google Drive, containing information including a list of account passwords, and all of her emails. This means there will be a December day when, instead of standing in the kitchen with my mom, I’ll be standing with her digital ghost. I’ll have mourned her physical passing, but will still be able to summon a part of her via my phone, propped up against the flour with one of many smudged and annotated recipe scans on display.

On this day, I expect I will grieve again. As the author Marisa Renee Lee noted in this magazine last year, “Grief is the repeated experience of learning to live after loss.” Today, with our ever-expanding digital and technological reach, loved ones left behind must encounter more reminders of that loss than ever before. Memory endures through the email accounts still collecting marketing messages, the Facebook arguments frozen in time, the iPad that continues to uselessly ping about an overdue library book. Left unattended, these digital assets float aimlessly in the internet’s ether. To have control over them presents the inheritor with a challenging personal quandary: Do they take advantage of the weird comfort these digital remains can provide, sinking into an in-between world where the person who died still feels alive, in small pixelated ways? Or do they shut it all down and accept a second death?  

Estate lawyers have long encouraged clients to account for their digital property, but no one has come up with an emotional road map for the burden of inheriting these things. Some logistical matters will only reveal themselves when it’s too late, forcing widows like Ashley Reese to take their grief to the Apple store.

“I had a weird breakdown,” Reese told me. Her husband, Robert Stengel, died from peritoneal mesothelioma in December at the age of 34. He left behind a comprehensive list of accounts and passwords, and among the things Reese inherited were his AirPods. It was seven months before she felt ready to resurrect his Apple Watch, which she brought to the Apple store for troubleshooting. An employee told her she was wearing it wrong. “I couldn’t do it,” she recalled. “I’m just like, ‘I’m sorry, this is not mine; it’s my dead husband’s.’”

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More so than ever before, it is possible for someone to live on through these digital shadows. In addition to holding on to his AirPods and Apple Watch, Reese still keeps her iMessage conversation with Stengel pinned to the top of the Messages app—she once accidentally sent him a text, and tried to unsend it when she realized. When she wants to watch something on Hulu, she can still select his profile. When she opens up YouTube, the algorithm still recommends Succession recaps or fight-scene compilation videos, the things Stengel would be watching if he were alive. When she’s really missing him, she’ll open up his camera roll, and look at one of the last pictures he took—a photo of Reese in his hospital room, unaware that she was being snapped. “This is just psychic damage every day,” she said.

Lingering in someone’s posthumous digital presence can be as painful as it is comforting, and comes with unexpected revelations. “You don’t want to read too much,” Marie, a woman whose mother died from ovarian cancer last fall, told me. (Marie asked to withhold her last name in order to speak about her family.) Her mom was proactive about her end-of-life plans, going so far as to order her own headstone before she died. She left Marie with her phone, and a list of passwords for all of her accounts. Looking through the device in the days after her mother’s death, Marie found a text thread where her mom had been venting to a friend about a fight they’d had. Marie discovered a Twitter account that her mom had apparently used to spar with right-wingers online—Marie had always thought her mother was as conservative as these opponents. Her Spotify was also revealing: “She listened to so much Taylor Swift, and I had no idea she liked Taylor Swift.”

Family and friends, themselves grieving, will send text messages to Marie’s mother’s phone. They say they miss her, hoping the sentiment somehow reaches her in the great beyond. Marie reads them. “It’s a nice reminder that she was important to people,” she told me. To know her mother lives on in the thoughts and memories of others is a comfort, one she can now easily access through a screen. Technology like this, which can document a previously intangible part of a person’s legacy, is a gift. It’s also extremely fragile.

Websites shut down, accounts get hacked, devices break. It’s not safe to assume that direct-message conversations and other social-media memories will be there forever. “My current plan is to just try to do as many digital copies of things as possible,” Reese told me. She has 10 years’ worth of messages with Stengel, and plans to back them up on her computer, in Google Drive, and to her iCloud. “I would be absolutely devastated if I lost that stuff.”

[Read: What losing two children taught me about grief]

At the same time, these digital spaces can help combat another inevitability: that, as the months go by, Reese will start to forget. “I have this compulsion now where if I have any thought about Rob or any memory, I’ll immediately open my Notes app and write it down,” she said, “to remind myself of who I was and who he was, and make sure all those [memories] are intact.”

It’s tempting not to think about death, choosing instead to be walloped by grief’s right hook one day out of nowhere. Even when my mom let me know about the plans for her Google account, fearing I’d receive an email notification and panic, she didn’t use the word dead. We both knew what she meant, though, and now that I know what awaits me, the records of our digital interactions have more meaning. The Wordle scores texted back and forth, the DMs about our favorite Instagram-famous dog, even the hokey e-cards we still send each other on holidays—these things no longer feel like just more clutter in a digital abyss. Someday, they’ll be the only thing that’s left.

Remember when Donald Trump tweeted? Of course you do! The 45th president commanded the world’s attention one 280-character post at a time, until he was suspended from the platform two and a half years ago. He used the platform to troll, harass, and lie. He amplified conspiracy theorists and their views. He antagonized volatile nuclear world powers and told election deniers about a January 6 protest on the National Mall: “Be there, will be wild!” And that’s just what we, the public, could see.

Earlier today, an unsealed court opinion revealed that prosecutors working for Special Counsel Jack Smith obtained a search warrant in January to access the now-dormant account of @realDonaldTrump, perhaps in order to learn what, if anything, went on behind the scenes—in messages or drafts that users can’t see. According to the opinion, the warrant “directed Twitter to produce data and records related” to Trump’s account. The company initially refused to comply, because the warrant contained a clause prohibiting Twitter from notifying Trump that the government had issued the warrant. After being held in contempt of court and fined $350,000, Twitter ultimately handed over the information.

According to experts I spoke with, the warrant appears straightforward, and the nondisclosure element is common enough in criminal investigations where prosecutors are worried about evidence being destroyed or mishandled. (Had Trump been alerted, he might have deleted whatever Smith was hoping to find.) It’s worth noting that Twitter frequently receives and sometimes complies with government requests for information. An April report by Rest of World revealed that, under Elon Musk’s ownership, the company “received 971 government demands, and fully complied with 808 of them.” Of course, Trump’s is no ordinary Twitter account, and the charges against the former president—regarding the handling of classified material as well as alleged attempts to thwart the peaceful transfer of power—are extraordinary.

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“Going to online accounts for evidence of conspiracies is very common,” Orin Kerr, a law professor at UC Berkeley, told me. “If you put aside the astounding fact that this is happening to a former president, it makes sense. They’re investigating a crime, and he was certainly using Twitter a lot.”

Smith’s warrant raises all sorts of questions about what the special counsel might be looking for, and what the prosecutors might see while accessing the former president’s account.

Will investigators comb through Trump’s direct messages? Is there useful information to be gleaned from IP addresses associated with @realDonaldTrump? Prosecutors might also want to identify the specific device from which certain tweets were sent, in order to more tightly link them to Trump: Trump told Politico in 2019 that although he “generally” wrote his own tweets, his aide Dan Scavino sometimes helped.

“Ultimately, we just don’t know what Smith got,” Kerr said. “There’s some hint in the opinion that they were doing keyword searches, which could mean that prosecutors don’t have access to everything, but we just don’t know.”

[Read: Trump’s threat to democracy is now systemic]

Of course, there’s the voyeuristic curiosity of how one of the world’s most prolific and important tweeters used the app behind the scenes. Trump’s unsent tweet drafts could theoretically be used as evidence, although we simply don’t know whether Smith has them. Did Donald Trump, who was known to eschew most forms of digital communication, including email, and who only recently started texting, directly message people? If not, his direct-message inbox is likely not very interesting; Trump’s reinstated account has only 51 followers on the platform, most of them official accounts and family members, and has closed DMs, meaning outsiders can’t initiate contact unless the president follows them back.

There is, as Kerr noted, no guarantee that anything substantive will come from digging through Trump’s infamous account: “If there are no direct messages, there’s probably not a lot of evidence there.” And it’s entirely possible that prosecutors simply obtained the warrant to help submit Trump’s tweets as evidence in court: Creating an official chain of custody would remove doubt that any given tweet actually existed, if the question were raised down the line.

There’s a great deal about the search of Trump’s Twitter account that we don’t know and may never know about. It will not shock you to know that I am not an attorney—merely a Twitter-addled tech writer who has covered the platform for well over a decade. But I believe there is one indisputable lesson that any human being ought to take away from today’s news: Never tweet. (Especially if you think there’s even a small chance that you may end up in a situation where a federal prosecutor charges you with conspiring to defraud the government.) Should the special counsel find a smoking gun buried within the recesses of Trump’s account, its public excavation would be the direct result of more than a decade of Trump’s digital bloviating. His obsession with the platform led to this moment. It marks the evolution of Trump’s Twitter account, morphing from a curiosity into a weapon and, finally, into a legal target.