Nobody warns you that grief comes with admin. Accounts, subscriptions, the phone plan, the mail that keeps arriving in their name like a small cruelty. You don't have to do it all, and you don't have to do it now. Ten-minute pieces, because that's what you have.
Can wait indefinitely
- Their clothes and things - 'not yet' is a real answer for as long as you need it
- Social media accounts (memorialize or close later; there's no deadline)
- The voicemail greeting - many people keep it on purpose
Ten-minute pieces, when you can
- One subscription cancelled per sitting - never the whole list at once
- Mail: one 'return to sender' pile by the door, emptied weekly
- The phone plan: ask for a bereavement transfer, not a cancellation - you may want the number
- A single folder (paper or photos on your phone) where every document lands, unsorted. Sorting is a later problem
Worth asking someone else to do
- Calls to companies that will make you repeat the death over and over
- Anything involving hold music and the sentence 'I'm calling because my person died'
Every cancelled subscription can feel like erasing them a little. It isn't. The paperwork was never where they lived.