The will is just the beginning of closing down someone's life.

I read the article below on the internet and I recognised how much of it was relevant to the first weeks after a death. When my husband died, I could close a lot of official government accounts directly from a list given me when I registered his death, but there were also things that I needed passwords and codes to access, which had been set up years before, and used daily by him, which were a mystery to me. I have copied and pasted the article here. I deleted the name of the (very useful-sounding) planner mentioned in it, partly because GN doesn't allow advertising, but also because it would be US-biased and probably not relevant in the UK, but you may be able to get hold of a similar publication to the Age UK booklet (which I think is now discontinued)

The article-
"If you are not prepared this will be your nightmare.
Most people think the will is the part that protects their family. In my office, the will is the part that gets handled in an afternoon. The part that breaks people is everything the will does not cover, and most adult children do not find out the difference until the Wednesday after the service.

I have run my father's funeral home since 2011. I have walked more families through more probate folders than I can put a number on.
The folder is never the problem. The folder gets opened. The lawyer gets called. The forms get signed.
The problem is the second drawer down in the parent's night-stand. The phone in it. The accounts behind it. The hundreds of small pieces of life nobody thought to write down because nobody thought of them as paperwork.

A son sat across from me on a Wednesday morning in February. His mother had passed the previous Saturday after a short illness.
He was the older of two siblings and the named executor. He had the will, the trust binder, the death certificate, and a notebook his mother had filled with what she called the important things.
He thought he had everything.
He had nothing that was going to help him in the next six weeks.

His mother had kept her phone on the kitchen counter. She had used it for everything. Banking. Pharmacy refills. The hospital portal. The grocery delivery. The thermostat. The car app.
She had set it up with Face ID years before. Face ID needed her face. After she stopped using the phone, the clock started.
After forty-eight hours of inactivity, the phone fell back to a passcode she had set up in 2019 and nobody in the family knew it. He guessed twice. His sister told him to stop before they got locked out for good.

The phone sat on the counter with eleven verification methods locked inside it.
The bank wanted a code by text to the number on the phone. The retirement plan wanted a code from an authenticator app on the phone. The Medicare portal wanted a confirmation through the phone's email client.

Apple would not let him in. He had the death certificate. He had the executor letter. He had the trust naming him as successor trustee. Apple has its own process. It takes months, and even then it does not unlock the phone.

He thought the trust would solve this. The trust transferred ownership of the house and the brokerage. It did not log into his mother's email. It did not unlock the phone. The accounts in her name alone were still hers.

He thought the power of attorney his mother had signed two years before would carry him through. The lawyer told him gently that POA ended the moment she did. It was permission while she was alive.
It became void the moment she died.

He thought the joint chequeing he had been added to in 2020 was his to use. The bank explained the difference between a joint owner and an authorised signer.
He had been a signer. The day she died, his signing rights ended with hers.

He thought putting his sister on the credit card last year had created a backup. The card was a designated-user setup. The card closed when the cardholder died. His sister's access closed with it.
That is half the estate. The locked half.
The other half is the half I cannot stop thinking about, because every family meets it for the first time in the second week and nobody had warned them.

The accounts that did not lock kept charging.
His mother had a Peloton membership. Hulu. The New Yorker. A wine club that delivered every other month. A meditation app she had stopped using a year ago. A wireless plan she had downgraded but never cancelled. A subscription to a craft service her granddaughter had set up on her behalf.

He thought he could close them by cancelling the credit card. The credit card processor had quietly moved her auto-pays to the next card on file when the first one was reported missing in March. The charges kept coming.

He thought he could close them by sending the death certificate to each company.
Most companies do not accept death certificates by email. Some require a notarised affidavit. Some only accept a written request from the executor with a court-issued letter, which he did not have yet, because probate had not finished.

He thought he could close them by logging into her email and unsubscribing. The email account was on the phone he could not unlock.
And even if he did have the passcode, I have watched what happens to families who walked in here holding it.

A daughter came in last August. She had been sitting at her father's kitchen table for four months by the time we met.
She had the phone. She had the passcode. Her father had written it on the inside cover of his address book and she had found it on the second day.
She had still been sitting at the table for four months.

She found a streaming service still charging her father's card three months later because nobody had been able to log into his Yahoo account to confirm the cancellation.
The Yahoo account had its own password. She did not have it. The recovery email was an AOL address from a decade before she had her first email of her own.

She did not know the answers to his security questions. She did not know which authenticator app he used, or which accounts were inside it.
She did not know which of his four email addresses was linked to which bank, which subscription, which login.
She did not know which of his accounts had two-factor turned on or which phone number the codes were going to.

She had the phone. She had the passcode. She had every door in the house unlocked.
She still could not get into a single room.
Half her father's life had gone dark. Half of it was still draining the account.
The phone is the first lock. Everyone thinks it is the only one.

He sat in my office that Wednesday morning with the folder his mother had given him and asked me what he was supposed to do.
I had stopped knowing what to tell people in the moment a long time ago.

I drove home that night and parked in front of my house for ten minutes before I went inside.
My husband does not know my email password. He does not know which authenticator app I use. He has never opened the banking app on my phone. He has never seen the recovery code list I keep for myself. He has never had a reason to.
If I had been the one who passed last Saturday, he would have been sitting in someone else's office on Wednesday with the same look on his face.
I had been watching adult children walk into this office for fifteen years.
I had not done a single thing about my own house.

I tried that weekend. I really did.
I started an Excel spreadsheet at the kitchen table. It took me two hours to get through six accounts trying to trace and track every single method. I kept realising I was forgetting things and having to go back.
I closed the laptop.
I tried a password manager. A friend had recommended 1Password. I downloaded it and opened the app store reviews.
I read about a breach a few years earlier. Customer vaults exposed. Master passwords cracked. Recovery handled by the same phone the master password was on.
I closed the app.

What I needed was not going to be online.
Recently a colleague mentioned something at our most recent state funeral directors' conference. She worked out of a smaller practice three counties over.
She had started handing something out to every pre-need family she met with.
Not a form. Not a binder. Not an attorney brochure. A planner.

She said the families had started coming back six months later to tell her it was the most useful thing they had walked out of her office with in their lives.

She told me what was different about it. It did not start with the passwords. It started with the phone.
Then it walked every lock in the chain in order. Authenticator app. Recovery email. Security answer. Backup codes. Verification number. What to keep alive. What to cancel. In what order.

I ordered one in the lobby of the conference hotel before the next session started.
I sat with my husband at our kitchen table the following Sunday afternoon. He thought I had brought him another piece of paperwork.
He started asking me questions I had been answering for other people for fifteen years and had never once been asked in my own house.
What is the recovery email for the mortgage? Where is the printed list of backup codes? Which of the three credit cards in this drawer is the active one? What is the answer to the security question on the utility account?
I did not have clean answers for a single one.
We worked through the book together over the weekend.

I am writing this because last week, a daughter walked into my office whose father had passed the previous Friday.
She had purchased and filled out the planner by the time she saw me. She spent Sunday cancelling subscriptions while her brother sat next to her at the table reading them out from the book.
They got through twenty-three to cancel in an afternoon.
She said it was the only thing in the entire week that had felt manageable.

I have witnessed the difference this journal makes in action. I have seen how it works. That is why I felt the need to write this down.
It is Wednesday morning again. Another son is sitting in the chair where everybody sits. He has the will, the trust binder, the death certificate, and a notebook with what his mother called the important things.
I am about to slide the probate form across the desk for him to sign.
I already know what he is going to find when he walks into his mother's house tonight. I cannot stop it from this office. The clock has been running on him since Saturday and nobody has told him it is on.

If there is someone in your family whose phone quietly runs the whole house, the will is not the document that is going to help your family in the first six weeks.
The will handles what they own.
It does not handle what they can reach.
If the part that holds what they can reach is not written down, step by step, in the order it needs to be opened, it is not a plan.
It is a ticking clock nobody realises has already started."

No link, I am sorry, but I didn't copy the name of the author of this article, and now I can't find it again.