Death in GLMZ involves not only the biological cessation of a person but the complex management of their accumulated digital existence — neural interface logs, civic score histories, employment records, social overlay data, and in many cases partial cognitive maps generated by more advanced implants. The question of who owns this data after death, and what becomes of it, has generated one of the most contentious areas of both law and cultural practice in the contemporary megacity. The Corporate Sovereignty Accords assigned post-mortem data rights to the implant manufacturer by default, a provision that was challenged in the Meridian Civil Court system twelve times in the 2040s before being upheld in the landmark *Estate of Cho v. Nexus Neural Systems* ruling of 2151.

Formal death ritual has fragmented along tier lines in ways that reflect the broader stratification of Meridian life. Upper-tier funerary practice increasingly incorporates what the industry calls 'digital memorialization services' — curated reconstructions of the deceased's overlay history, behavioral patterns, and recorded memories assembled into navigable memorial environments that survivors can access through their own neural interfaces. The largest provider of these services, Remnant Systems, charges between 40,000 and 200,000 civic credits for a full memorial construction. Critics, including the Meridian Grief Counselors Collective, have argued that these services commodify mourning and create psychologically harmful dynamics in which survivors relate to a commercial reconstruction rather than processing loss.

In the lower tiers, death ritual has taken on a different character shaped by material constraint and community solidarity. In communities where neural implants are older or absent, the data-afterlife question is largely moot, and funerary culture has retained or revived practices with older roots. In the Calumet and Burnside districts, community death vigils called 'sittings' are held in shared residential spaces, lasting 36 to 48 hours, with food, music, and the oral recounting of the deceased's life. These sittings are explicitly positioned by community members as an alternative to corporate memorial services — a way of asserting that a person's life can be honored without being monetized. Several community-organized sitting collectives have registered as nonprofit mutual aid organizations to formalize the practice.

A growing cultural movement called the Data Mortuary advocates for mandatory data death — the complete deletion of a person's accumulated digital records upon biological death, unless the individual has explicitly opted to donate their data for research or memorial purposes. Data Mortuary chapters operate in most major districts and hold public 'data funeral' events at which participants ceremonially purge their own non-essential data as a rehearsal for death and a statement about data sovereignty. These events are festive and well-attended, drawing participants from across tier lines, and have become one of the few cultural phenomena in GLMZ that genuinely bridges the social stratification that otherwise divides the city.