Sometimes, when I’m burnt out from whatever documentary is currently hijacking my life, I fall into an old habit. I open a browser window and start searching for my mother.

I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for—just this sense that I’ll recognize it when I find it. I always begin with “Louise Horlor” in floating quotes. Then her maiden name. I’ve tried old email handles, phone numbers, and half-remembered usernames. Over the years, I’ve expanded into newspaper archives, genealogy sites, land titles, court records, and data scrapers—the same tools journalists, investigators, and debt collectors now use to comb through the digital residue of our online lives.

You’d be surprised how many ways there are to find someone online. And yet, for years, she never turned up.

Until one day, she did.

We’re walking, my mother and I, along the rocky beach in front of my aunt’s cabin at Otter Point. It’s early in the new millennium—maybe June 2000—and we’re about an hour west of Victoria, on the southern coast of Vancouver Island. It’s midday and the tide is out. Brown seaweed steams in the bright white sun. The beach is all shifting gravel and slick stones. We sink a little with every step forward.

I ask her to wade into the ocean so I can take her photo. She’s wearing a grey Boca T-shirt and loose cotton shorts—clothes too light for the wind blowing off the open Pacific. Still, she humours me.

She stops ankle-deep. When I motion for her to go farther, she laughs like it’s the punchline to a joke we both know. She cups her hands around her mouth so the wind doesn’t steal her words, and shouts: “But it’s freezing!”

I’m 19 and the novelty of my new digital point-and-shoot camera hasn’t worn off yet. I drop into a serious-photographer stance—knees bent, eye squinting. She lifts one arm in an exaggerated ta-da, like she’s a wealthy socialite posing for a segment on Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous. All she’s missing is a flute of champagne and a live-in tennis instructor named Chad.

A gust of wind blows hair into her mouth and she sputters. For a second, we’re both laughing, neither of us saying anything, just trying to stay upright on the rocks. Our roles have reversed lately. She started chemo last month, and lately, I find myself watching her the way she used to watch me. Every time she wobbles on the rocks, my body tenses, instinctively bracing.

Her hair is newly streaked with blonde—something she did for herself before treatment. Now it clings to her cheek, damp from sea spray. She tucks it behind her ears. She hikes up her shorts as the waves roll in. When I lift the camera again, she looks directly into the lens and smiles.

My mother isn’t missing, estranged, or famous. She’s just dead, yet here I am, searching for her anyway. She passed away in 2001—before social media, before video sharing, before digital footprints, before we measured a life by what could be Googled. No memorial page. No tagged photos. No digital echo. She slipped out of time before online presence became a new form of existence. To love someone who only lived in the analog world is to experience true erasure. It’s like reaching for a light switch in a house that’s been demolished.

Then, during the pandemic, something changed. As more newspapers digitized their archives, I searched again, more out of habit than hope, and there it was: my mother’s name—one line buried in an obituary for my grandmother Mary from 1997. I stared at it for a long time. “Survived by her daughter Louise…” Proof she had existed, in a way Google could finally recognize. It wasn’t much, but it hit me hard anyway

It was around that time I began writing about my mother again—here, on Substack. I slipped her into stories I told about other things and brought her up during interviews. And then there was a memorial credit on IMDb, added by the director of the reality show I used to host. Next: a genealogy record, uploaded by my aunt. It felt like we were bringing her back, one line of metadata at a time.

This is what our culture does now. It resurrects through search results.

A couple of months ago, I started using Sora to turn old photos of mine into videos, around the time Pete Hegseth, the current U.S. Secretary of Defence, was having his viral moment. He’d leaked top-secret bombing plans in a Telegram group, accidentally inviting a journalist, and somehow became the subject of a thousand AI-generated thirst traps.

Even my directing partner made one—of Pete Hegseth channelling Kurt Russell in Overboard—and he sent it to me, along with a short text: Sora’s new update is fucking insane.

If you’ve never heard of Sora, it’s a photo and video generation tool from OpenAI, the same company behind ChatGPT. Technically, it’s a diffusion transformer, which is shorthand for “a denoising latent diffusion model with one transformer as the denoiser.” (Still with me? My brain also short-circuited halfway through that last sentence.) You might’ve used something like DALL-E or Midjourney before—generative AI photo tools that create surreal, sometimes uncanny images from text prompts. Sora builds on that idea, but it can now generate entire videos too.

OpenAI released a new feature around the same time the Hegseth memes were circulating: the ability to upload a still photo and prompt Sora to generate a 5- or 10-second video with realistic, cinematic movement. I told myself I was just testing it out—but really, I wanted to see if she’d move the way I remembered.

So let's say you decide to upload an old photo of your mother at the beach. You ask Sora to turn it into a 5-second video with a slow zoom, as if shot on a consumer-grade digital camera from the year 2000. What happens now?

What Sora does next isn’t literal. It doesn’t know your mom or that beach. According to OpenAI, Sora has a probabilistic understanding of similar scenes from its training data. If the image shows a woman standing in shallow ocean water holding up her shorts, it predicts (to varying degrees of accuracy) what someone might do in that scene. While posing, she will likely shift her weight slightly or laugh at the camera. Small waves will crest and recede around her legs. Since the wind is most likely to be coming off the ocean, it will blow her hair towards the shore.

Is it her? Of course not. But it makes me wonder: if someone else had created this AI video and posted this online, would I have believed it was real? The way she shifts her weight, the way the waves are breaking—it feels like my memory of that day.

In that way, Sora is closer to how memory works than photography. A photo captures one moment. When we look at that photo, we rely on our memories to fill in the moments before and after it, which is exactly what Sora does, too.

It’s tempting to think of our memories like photographs—fixed moments, frozen in time. But they aren’t. Not even close.

Years ago, while working on a film about false memories, I was fortunate enough to interview Elizabeth Loftus, one of the most influential memory scientists of our time. She compared memory to a Wikipedia page: “You can go in and edit it,” she said, “but so can other people.”

She told me that if you don’t record a memory within the first 24 hours—in a journal, a voice memo, or even a video—its edges will begin to blur. Your brain will start filling in the gaps with what feels right, rather than what’s true. Which means that every time you recall a memory, you’re retrieving the last version you remembered, not the original.

Like that photo of my mother at Otter Point. There’s my memory from that day and the memory of flipping past it in an album with my younger sister a decade later. The memory of her sending me a digital copy, then all the times we’ve posted it online: for Mother's Day, her birthday, or the anniversary of her death. All these layers of memory on memory, shaped by time and repetition.

At this point, I’ve probably remembered the memory more times than I lived it. It’s starting to feel like Sora knows more about that beach day than I do.

I’m getting closer to the age my mother was when she died. I’ve lived more of my life without her than with her. Sometime during the pandemic, I realized some of my clearest memories of her are tied to photographs, and I began writing on Substack to make sense of those images, wondering if they were distorting and concealing more than they revealed.

Around that same time, I found Elaine Kasket, a British psychologist who writes about the digital afterlife. She was posting short, candid essays on her Substack, Wednesday’s Ghost, about her personal life and what it was like to write again after years of silence. Her voice was honest and self-deprecating. It helped reignite a feeling I’d mostly lost—that the internet could still be a place for ideas and connection, not just shirtless selfies, shitposting, and anonymous trolling.

Posts by Kasket and others also made me feel less alone, especially during the first half of 2023, when I was promoting my film, Satan Wants You. Publicly, in press interviews and sold-out movie theatre screenings, I told stories about my bizarre childhood connection to the real-life couple who are often blamed for the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and ’90s. But privately, my thirteen-year relationship was collapsing in slow motion. I was trapped in a funhouse mirror, making the same mistakes my parents had made in their marriage decades earlier. I felt like I had learned nothing from my childhood—living proof that those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it.

In the months that followed, I deep-dived into her interviews, recorded talks, and her book. In All the Ghosts in the Machine: Illusions of Immortality in the Digital Age, she writes about how, under current laws, our data doesn’t belong to our families after we die. Technically, privacy ends at death, but tech companies continue to protect the “rights” of the deceased as if they’re still active users. Kasket calls it agency laundering: refusing to grant access to next of kin under the guise of protecting the wishes of people who no longer exist.

I keep thinking about how hard I’ve worked for decades just to find even a whisper of my mother online, in contrast to the families who now have to fight their way into dead loved ones’ accounts to save photos or say goodbye. Kasket explains that Facebook memorials become haunted rooms, places where the living and the dead are stuck in feedback loops, where grief becomes automated by birthday reminders and memory notifications, algorithmically resurfaced without context or consent. For some grievers, this digital connection to a deceased loved one is a relief, yet for others, it’s a form of torture.

And it goes deeper. Kasket warns that digital immortality isn’t about preservation: it’s about data retention. The dead don’t click ads, but their profiles still keep others scrolling. In her book, she describes Facebook as the largest cemetery in the world—a bleak milestone for a platform that still suggests I friend exes from the last millennium. Facebook already has hundreds of millions of profiles for deceased users, a number that could grow to over two billion by the end of this century. Not only is our grief monetized, but it also comes with a hefty carbon footprint, powered by data centers that will consume more and more energy to keep these dead profiles alive.

That’s the part I can’t shake: the idea that all this effort to remember (the searching, the reposting, the animating) might not be memory at all. It might just be waste. Digital ghost clutter. A burden we keep uploading because we don’t know how to let go.

One thing I’ve learned from years of making documentaries is that people often choose a version of the past they can live with. That could be the story of what happened, or the story we tell ourselves about what happened. Although we can’t change the past, we can change what it means to us, and I think that’s the story I’ve always been most interested in anyway.

A couple of weeks ago, I asked my younger sister who took the photo at Otter Point. She told me to check with our aunt MaryAnne.

When I emailed my aunt, she wrote back almost immediately, with the kind of email that made me picture her in her quilting room, bright squares of fabric pinned overhead, typing slowly on the keypad of her phone, occasionally stopping to push her glasses up the bridge of her nose.

She consulted her journal from that time and confirmed the photo had been taken at her cottage. That part, at least, I had right. But then she added: Looks like it was taken early September 1999. Your mum overnighted at the cottage with me the day after Labour Day.

I stared at the date on my screen—September 1999. A full year earlier than I thought. How strange that my aunt was the one behind the camera when I had been so sure it was me.

She continued: Don’t have anything written about why she spent the night. Both your parents had been to the cottage in August for dinner. I vaguely remember her wanting to spend a weekend there by herself later that fall.

And then, almost as an afterthought: Possibly with you-know-who. She didn’t tell me that, but I suspected it may have been the case. She left your father that November, I think.

So my mind had layered over the past with a fiction to hide the truth. This moment I’d returned to again and again wasn’t a final memory of us together. It was a prelude to everything falling apart: her affair, the separation, the cancer diagnosis, and the slow fading away of her life from ours.

Can we trust our memories? It’s the question I asked in my very first Substack post. Clearly, I can’t. But maybe that’s not the point. Maybe the value isn’t in remembering everything perfectly, but in being willing to go back and look again.

Elaine Kasket writes that when we lose someone close, we don’t just remember them, we carry them. We fold them into who we are—their values, their characteristics, aspects of their personality—until they’re part of the story we tell about ourselves. And maybe that’s what grief does to us in the end. It’s not about preserving the past exactly as it was, but choosing to reshape it into something we can bear.