It's a fact of life on the web: personal sites close down. The demands of off-line life may necessitate a hiatus, or perhaps the author simply loses interest in writing. Most bloggers create and distribute their work for free, so when faced with adversity it can be difficult to make publishing a priority.

Of course, most of the time the author will make a brief announcement that she is "taking a break," to let their regular readers know that updates will not be coming for a while. When a site closes down permanently there will often be a farewell post, sometimes with explanations, sometimes without. But sometimes a site will be abandoned without any explanation whatsoever.

During my time on-line I've experienced this sudden absence on a few occasions, where a writer who I enjoyed just stops writing. When it was a person to whom I felt a personal connection, or who had posted about personal worries or depression, the abrupt disappearance was more troubling. Still, though, there was nothing I could do. The unanswered questions nag at me for a while, but the web is a vast space, and soon enough something new comes along to distract me.

On three occasions, though, the questions were answered, although without favorable outcomes. Three times there were delayed updates to the site, posted by family members who bore the burden of telling a community they neither knew nor understood that the person behind the words had died: twice from suicide, once from a disease we never knew she was fighting. While difficult to read, at least there was a sense of closure, with the open comments on the sites serving as digital wakes.

With the explosion of blogs, journals, and MySpace pages in recent years, these events are almost commonplace. The availability of Internet access to the armed forces has enabled many soldiers to create blogs, and soldiers die with appalling frequency these days; it is a certainty that many of those new bloggers are gone. All told, by this point there must be thousands of electronic revenants haunting the web, some with closure, some simply remaining unsolved forever.

I don't want that to happen to me, or to this site. In the past I made arrangements with a friend to act as my on-line executor, sending her the account names and passwords she would need to post on my behalf, and the text of my final published words. However, even with the planning, I never got around to completing that final step. When the project went past theory and into practice there was just something vaguely unsettling about it all.

Of course, a couple of years ago I nearly died, without having finished that chapter. While I was in the hospital, waiting my turn for surgery, I fired up the laptop and wrote the epilogue to my on-line life. It was tough; you can't exactly ask someone to edit something that personal, and I am not immune to the irony of having my last words be full of misspellings and grammatical errors. Fortunately, it wasn't needed; Demerol is an excellent painkiller, but a lousy muse.

What immortality I may achieve will be digital — bit-based words swirling through the Internet's luminiferous aether until the last server is unplugged. I can't say with certainty that it will ever mean anything, but I will do my best to provide a reasonable "final episode."