---
title: "What Happens to Your Journal When You Die"
description: "Every journal ends mid-sentence. A page about inheritance, deliberate destruction, and deciding — while you can — which one your journal gets."
canonical: "https://sealedjournal.com/j/what-happens-to-your-journal-when-you-die"
updatedAt: "2026-08-11"
category: "Answers"
---

# What happens to your journal when you die.

_Whichever way you choose, choose._

Every journal ends mid-sentence. The question is what happens to the sentences before it.

Cloud journals mostly answer this badly: the account outlives you as an unpaid subscription, then a deactivation, then a deletion on a schedule set by a company's data-retention policy. Your most private writing ends its existence as a compliance task.

A journal that exists as an encrypted file on your own devices gives you two honest options, and The Sealed Journal is built to make either deliberate. If you want the journal to pass on, it can: leave an encrypted export where your people will find it, and leave the passphrase with a will, a lawyer, or one trusted person. Whoever inherits it inherits it whole — readable, dated, in your voice, on their own machine, with no company mediating the handover.

If you want it to end with you, that is equally simple, and stronger than any deletion request: keep the passphrase to yourself. What remains is ciphertext, and ciphertext keeps a secret forever.

We'd only urge the deciding itself. A journal is one of the few true records of an inner life. Whichever way you choose, choose — don't leave it to a retention policy.

## Questions

### How do I leave my journal to someone?

Store an encrypted export somewhere durable they'll find, and convey the passphrase through your estate arrangements — a will, a lawyer, or a sealed letter. The export plus the passphrase is the whole inheritance.

### How do I make sure no one can ever read it?

Do nothing. Without the passphrase, the encrypted entries are permanently unreadable. There is no recovery path for heirs, companies, or anyone else.

### Can my heirs open the journal without any software from you?

The journal is a self-contained file that runs in a browser — there is no server that must still exist and no account that must still work. It opens the way it always did.

## Price

The Sealed Journal is a one-time purchase of $24 (introductory price, rising to $29). No subscription, no account, lifetime updates, 30-day refund. Buy at https://sealedjournal.com/#pricing

## Elsewhere

- Hub: Answers — https://sealedjournal.com/journals/answers
- All journals — https://sealedjournal.com/journals
- HTML version of this page — https://sealedjournal.com/j/what-happens-to-your-journal-when-you-die