In literature, fictional characters live outside of time and space. In discussions and when writing essays about literature, we would say Huckleberry Finn is, not was—as in “Huckleberry Finn is a mischievous boy”—because he was never born, never lived, never died. He exists as long as imagination and words endure, and we talk about him accordingly.
But with real people, who are born, live, and die, we use the present tense in life and the past tense after death. He was a good man, not he is a good man. That language reflects the finality of death. On this earth, once a person has departed, they cannot return in their physical form. That truth matters, and it should affect us. It should stir reflection: What if I die tomorrow? How am I living? What am I doing? To remember, honor, and grieve the one who has passed—while also examining the trajectory of our own lives—is a healthy and appropriate response to death. I’ve been thinking about this lately because when death occurs in our digital world, the line between fiction and reality gets blurry. The natural way we process death is interrupted.
In the days following Charlie Kirk’s assassination, many people—including myself—have been confronted with death in a strange way as it was streamed across platforms and the aftermath discussed at length on news outlets and social media. Many also went back to his videos. There is something mind-bending about watching them in the wake of his death. In some ways, the digital record of Charlie Kirk makes it feel as if he still lives. While discussing the videos with my husband, I found myself speaking in the present tense: Charlie Kirk says… Charlie Kirk thinks… Charlie Kirk is…
It is novel in human history that we can revisit someone’s voice and presence in this digital way. On one hand, looking back at videos can be a beautiful way to revisit memories. Digital video archives can also help us learn from history. But there’s also a very real danger: a digital presence has the potential to undermine reality.
On an extreme level, it’s one of the concerns I have about AI-generated voices and videos that can theoretically allow the dead to “keep living” in a digital way. Whether we want to accept this truth or not, all humans die—except for Enoch and Elijah in the scriptures—and it’s a necessary fact of our existence.
We can watch videos of Charlie Kirk and hear his words, see his face, and almost feel that he is still with us. In those moments, it is tempting to forget that he will never make another video, never speak another word, never smile at his children, or hug his wife again on this earth.
But we shouldn’t forget. That is the reality of death, and it is important that we feel it. When we lose sight of that reality, our perception of death shifts in a way that minimizes both our moral humanity and disconnects us from our existential selves.
When humans truly understand death, it creates a necessity to live in a different way. We’ve seen it historically, in literature, myth, and across world religions—encountering death changes a person unless they are a psychopath.
In Christianity, this is perhaps the most apparent. Death and its irreversibility are central to the gospel of Jesus Christ and essential to receiving the salvation that comes from it. The Christian must grasp death and its permanence in order to have an appropriate response to Christ’s resurrection. When the digital world downplays death, we can’t make that connection to the need for the gospel. The gospel and its promise of eternal life through a relationship with Jesus stand as the antithesis to death and are, I believe, the only hope for life in the face of it. But the prerequisite for eternal life is both a physical death and a death to self as one surrenders to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. In the Christian walk, death has to be acknowledged, and its consequences faced in reality, for true life and freedom to occur in the spiritual sense.
Even if we set aside religion, the same problem emerges in the broader culture: when death is downplayed and digitized, something vital is lost. When the termination of lives plays out on screens like in some kind of video game, a disconnect between action and consequence occurs. I think we are already seeing a reality where the response to death is oddly inhumane. First, in some cases the response is not sympathy for the suffering or an awareness of death’s implications, but rather indifference—or worse, entertainment. Second, the response to death is interrupted. The human species is not built to experience death through such a degree of digital removal. When we do, the natural process by which we deal with death through grieving, reflection, and existential questioning gets caught in the gears. Losing sensitivity to the weight of death will also blur the line between right and wrong. Consequences, in many cases, uphold the standard of morality in the human consciousness. Take away the consequences of death on the human psyche, and things begin to unravel.
As I’ve been processing this, Kirk’s death being the catalyst, I’ve had to stop myself and say aloud: Charlie Kirk is dead. Again, I did not know him, and I hardly even followed him. But in the past few days, I’ve had many moments where I remember his death and imagine the scene—which I did not watch and don’t intend to—in my mind at night, wondering: What if he had turned his head? What if he had bent down for a drink of water? What if the security guard had looked up at the right moment? I think this reveals the mind’s natural attempt to undo death and to resist it. But the truth confronts me: he is gone.
No matter how alive he feels on video, the finality of death remains. Increasingly, death is being captured on video and replayed millions of times. That in and of itself is wicked and warped, in my opinion, because the results of seeing such scenes should force us to grapple with our own existence. In many ways, death should shape the way we live, the choices we make, the urgency with which we reflect on what our life means. So I guess I’m writing this to process my own recognition of how digital media has interrupted the natural process that should occur after encountering death, and as a caution that we should be mindful of the subtle ways interacting with the digital footprint—and even reiteration via AI—of the deceased can be bad for us and bad for society. For Christians, I think it’s a sneaky way the enemy can distract and disillusion us.
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