Cold storage is a type of pause that is effectively indistinguishable from disappearing forever.
It must be, because anyone who pauses their character this way—or has it autopaused for them, which uses the same code—cannot be assumed to ever be returning to the game.
It's not fair to people who are actively playing their characters to have valuable elder slots—and other guild positions—taken up by characters who might very well be gone forever.
Put bluntly: If you want to keep anything but your characters' reputations, you need to keep playing them.
So what do I do if I know I'll be unable to play for a month or so, but cannot say for sure if I'll be back in three weeks or in nine?
And is this explicitly stated on the pause page? Because my understanding is that one of the options auto-unpaused on its own, while the other did not.
As for elder slots... That's for the elders above to decide.
