What to do when someone dies & Service Design
My mum died at the end of October 2021, just over a year after she was diagnosed with peritoneal cancer.
She was an exceptionally cool person, who retired from teaching chemistry and spent the last ten years running marathons, travelling, keeping bees and chickens, and becoming very good at baking sourdough.
This post isn’t about her, or about cancer (it sucks!), or about a family member having terminal cancer in the pandemic (it sucks too!). But I didn’t want to talk about her death without talking about her as a person, however briefly.
Here’s what I am going to cover:
- My understanding of what to do when a close family member dies
- Some things my mum and I did that helped
- Service design thoughts about ‘telling a business about a death’ — which businesses are good, which are (in my opinion) poor
There will also be a second part tomorrow where I discuss relevant government services and how I think they could be improved.
I’ll bold and indent key advice.
What to do when a close family member dies and you’re the responsible adult
My mum wanted to project manage her own death, which tells you a lot about her. She advised me to search for existing articles about what to do, saying there were loads.
What I actually found when I went to look were a lot of US-based posts that were about grief, and the UK government’s What to Do When Someone Dies step-by-step. The latter is pretty good, but mostly (if not entirely) about telling the government. A too-quick glance also convinced me that Register a Death would be an online service, which it isn’t. Of that, more tomorrow.
Anyway. I thought it could be useful to make a list, based on what I remember.
1. Contact a funeral director.
I was surprised (because I hadn’t wanted to ask beforehand) that the hospice needed my mum collected within 24 hours.
You will be expected to act fast.
All funeral directors seem to require you to phone them, which is extremely inconvenient. Even the Co op, which was for a time full of GDS people, only has an online form that then requires someone to call you back. They only do package funeral (and quite expensive!) so we didn’t use them.
My mother’s partner handled the funeral director, which was a massive relief. We’d been worried (and my mum had been worried) that since she died on the Isle of Wight, but wanted to be buried on the mainland, it would be a complete disaster. Actually it was fine.
My mum died Saturday morning. Lots of funeral directors (at least on the Isle of Wight) seem not to work full time on the weekend, which is fair. I don’t work on the weekend! They take calls, though, and collect. Full discussion waited until the work week.
My mum chose to be buried at the Petersfield Sustainability Centre in Hampshire. Very beautiful, nice staff. I recommend it.
Overall, a separate funeral director and burial cost about £3,000.
The bank offered to advance me the money from the estate, but I declined. Still, it was an option.
2. Tell friends/family/other people you know who might be interested
And tell them what you want them to do with this knowledge. I’ll repeat this further down, but I think one of the best things I did was post on Facebook and Twitter and tell people to donate to my mum’s chosen charity and not try and talk to me about how I felt. Then I muted notifications about my posts.
What I absolutely didn’t want was for anyone who knew my mum was sick to ask me ‘How is your mum?’ and for me to have to answer that.
My mum’s partner got a lot of sympathy cards that he didn’t really want. I only got a few, and recycled all of them. I don’t know whether people like having cards up that remind them someone’s dead, but I definitely don’t.
3. Register the death with the council
The council were not open on the weekend.
They called me on Monday morning (proving they already knew about the death) and made a phone appointment for Tuesday. I was asked how many death certificates I wanted at £11 each. I got 5, just in case.
In my opinion, you only need 1 or 2 death certificates. Every single business or bank accepted an iPhone photograph of the certificate, even if they didn’t immediately advertise the fact.
Certificates were sent to me by post.
The Registrar offered to do the Tell Us Once service on my behalf, but I said I wanted to do it myself, because I was interested in government service design. (Really.) I also think it would have been more difficult to fill in over the phone, but you can get them to do it if you want.
4. Get the original will from the solicitor, if you don’t have it already, asap
I had a copy of the will, and honestly hadn’t even though I’d need the original until I was asked for it in the probate service — which I didn’t engage with for over a month, but it took me over a month to get the will from the lawyers once I started.
My lawyers were named as executors on the will. I didn’t realise this until after I completed online probate, so I had to get them to fill in a paper form.
The right form is PA17 (not PA15, ha! Of course not.) The lawyers offered to fill in the form for £250. The form is 3 pages. I filled it in myself.
5. Do the other government stuff
- Tell Us Once (ish)
- Road tax for any cars you told the government about in Tell Us Once and post a new ownership form
- Tell HMRC if you owe Inheritance Tax/value the estate — I thought I didn’t have to do this as I knew my mum’s estate would be valued at less than £350k, but you do have to do it
- Request probate
- Optionally — tell the council, re council tax if not reported in Tell Us Once
The step by step covers most of this. It’s all quite good, except for the bit about the car and other odd lacunae. More about this in my second post.
Teachers’ Pension very weirdly not included — more on this later in this post.
6. Tell banks and businesses
You have to wait to have the death certificate before you do this, in most cases.
You don’t have to wait for probate, which surprised me. Proving you are next of kin seemed to be enough.
The bank sent me all my mum’s money within a month.
My mum had told me to tell banks immediately, so I was semi-worried about not doing it sooner, but it seemed fine to wait a week or two.
The next section talks about telling banks and businesses in more detail.
7. Empty the house if no one lives there now
My mum lived with her partner, but he had a house down the road, which he was moving into. My brother and I inherit the property.
We all agreed it would be easier to remove everything asap. My partner who wasn’t emotionally compromised (about this — her dad had died in America the same evening, but while weird and upsetting, it’s not relevant to this story) really pushed this forward.
We took most things to the charity shop or recycling, rather than attempting to eBay them. Really good decision. Obvious advice is obvious but:
Prioritise what makes you feel least bad at this time, rather than what you think you should do.
Sent bras to bra charity.
8. Funeral
Ours was super small, just 5 guests, over in 15 minutes. Probably the least bad it could be.
My mum’s friends on the mainland who knew each other did a thing together. My mum’s partner organised a run on the Isle of Wight. I didn’t go to either, for the same reason I didn’t eBay her clothes. I didn’t think it would make me feel better.
9. Work out what you want to do with everything else
Possibly going to keep the car. Almost certainly going to sell the house. Have only just got the will, which I sent to HMCTS yesterday to complete my application for probate. I think it will take 2–3 months to process, once they get it, so we still have a while to decide.
Other than that, and dealing with the fact this sad thing has happened, I don’t think there’s much else. It’s quite intense for the first few weeks, but then quietened down.
I know my mum’s estate was very simple, but I did everything apart from the funeral director myself. I do bureaucracy for a living, but it wasn’t that hard, just sometimes annoying.
I’d recommend doing everything yourself, unless you think it would make yourself feel better to pay someone.
Some things my mum and I did that helped
My mum knew she was dying, and tackled that as practically as she could. That was her way of coping, along with trying to live as much as possible between chemo appointments and in a pandemic. Thankfully things opened up over the summer, when she felt pretty normal.
She did these things that were awkward at the time, but very helpful to me later:
- made a list of all her accounts she could remember, and what she thought I should do about them
- kept all her bank cards together in one wallet
- sold big expensive things in advance (Sonos speakers, an ice cream maker, a food-dehydration)
- told me she didn’t want a large funeral and that I shouldn’t feel obligated to hang out with her friends.
- spoke openly about how things were going on FaceBook up until the end, so people knew what was going on
- cancelled things she didn’t need in advance — for example, Smol dishwasher/washing machine tablets, and Brew Tea Co. In her last weeks in the hospice, she told me that Brew Tea had tried to offer her free tea when she’d told them she was terminally ill, and she’d said, thanks, but I can’t eat or drink, so they sent her flowers. She really appreciated that, even though she couldn’t have the flowers in the hospice either. So, it was completely worth it as a gesture.
She also kept a filing cabinet with every paper payslip, bank statement, insurance statement etc carefully filed, and often labelled. I was super impressed when I saw the level of detail here, but mostly it wasn’t useful. I just needed something with an account number on it. You might as well recycle those payslips from the 20th century, if you have them.
Things I did that I think were helpful for me:
- told people my my mum was dying a few months before it happened. I thought of this as radiating intent, like in Elizabeth Ayer’s blog about the problems with the idea: “It’s better to beg forgiveness than ask permission”. I didn’t want anyone to be surprised when I had to take time off, or if I totally fell apart
- told my colleagues that I didn’t want sympathy or to talk about how I felt
- made a semi-regularly updated list of things that I would need to hand over, if I needed to leave quickly. This was brilliant, because when I came back after 2 weeks, lots of my work had therefore been done for me by my friends.
- One of the items on the list was being the line manager for someone doing a work experience placement that might start at any moment. I originally put it on the list as something that might need to be handed over, but then thought — no, I’ll just hand this over as it’s stressing me out that it might happen and puts more uncertainty into this other person’s life.
- set my Out of Office to say I was out for ‘personal reasons’, because I didn’t want anyone to ask me if I’d had a nice holiday
- posted on Twitter and Facebook, as mentioned above, and asked people not to talk to me about it — not for everyone, but clearly very much for me! (Facebook told me they were sorry for my loss — it didn’t make me feel better.)
- took a week off to deal with as much as possible, and then took another week off a few weeks later for the funeral and to finish everything else.
- used her browser’s password store (and payments saved in Paypal) to find other accounts that she’d forgotten to include on the list, these included Netflix and the Guardian subscription.
I was sent three bunches of flowers, which is the same number of vases I have. Fortunately no more turned up. This I actually did appreciate, though, so thank you. My mum always used to send me flowers.
Service design thoughts about ‘telling a business about a death’
This is all my opinion, obviously.
Fully digital services are better services
What a shock, but it turns out GDS were right. I know that I’m exceptionally digitally literate, but I imagine a lot of people don’t want to talk about how someone they love is dead to a complete stranger. M&S Bank allowed me to fill in a PDF form and attach a photograph of the death certificate. They sent me a letter to confirm the account was closed and at no point did I have to speak to a human during working hours. The form was ugly and not accessible, but it did the job.
The key here for me as a user is that I wanted to be reassured that, having used the digital service, there would be no further offline action required from me later. In most cases, this was not a given.
If you don’t have a digital service, at least have a dedicated phone line
My mum had most of her accounts with First Direct. They have a dedicated bereavement line, which was advertised on their website. It was immediately clear when I spoke to the advisor that they knew why I was calling and had been trained to deal with this scenario.
In order to get the money from the accounts, I had to provide some information on the phone, and send a photograph of the death certificate through a slightly weird secure email site that I trusted less than just emailing them. They phoned me back during work hours a few weeks later and told me the value of the accounts, then asked me to fill in a Word document with my bank account information and send it back through the secure email site. Parts of this journey were awkward, but the people involved were good and I got the money within 7 days of submitting the form.
(Honestly, I find the ease with which I gained the money a little alarming, but it was convenient.)
In contrast to the First Direct journey, John Lewis Finance and British Telecom (BT) both had no dedicated line, meaning I ended up almost consoling the operator for hearing the bad news about my mother’s death.
To be fair, when I Googled it just now, I found John Lewis now using a company called Settld to tell them. I can’t comment on it, because I didn’t use it. BT also had an online form, which I could have used, but didn’t — see below.
If you have a service that requires you to call me back later, you are my enemy
As I mentioned above, one of the reasons I rang BT and several other providers even though they had an online form was that I wanted to complete the transaction on the day that I engaged with them.
I’d taken a week off to deal with my mother’s affairs, and wanted to go back to work because I like work and also thought it would be a distraction, which it was. I wanted to close all the accounts etc during that week.
EE (the mobile phone provider) had an online form, but needed to talk to me for some reason. They did this weird thing where they sent me a text from 150 telling me that the next mobile number to ring me would be EE, which I’d guess was trying to combat the fact that I don’t pick up the phone to numbers I don’t recognise.
It didn’t help me, though, because I was back at work and in a meeting. I missed the call. EE texted me a few days later to tell me I could expect another call — again, I was in a meeting. I haven’t called them back, I assume the worst they can do is make my mother’s credit rating go down and she doesn’t care about that.
What’s going on with Teachers’ Pension?
Firstly — surely, it should be part of Tell Us Once, as surely this is a public sector profession. Hopefully they will consider moving. (Even if they’re actually a private company?)
That’s not the only weird thing about telling Teachers’ Pension, though. This is a business that must expect to often be contacted about death, and yet the service they offer is so poor!
You’re told to call their regular helpline. The website links to a PDF form, but you don’t have a choice to fill and go. You must call. Then they tell you to fill in the form!!!
I could post it with a copy of the death certificate, or email it — I’m also not sure whether the operator was doing me a favour by suggesting the email option. I get the impression she was and it wasn’t usually offered. The email address has the word ‘attachments’ in it.
The form allows you to fill it out in the browser (mainly) but every piece of information is separated into fields per character. It’s so bad.
No one responded to this email, not even an autoreply, but a few weeks later I got some money that Monzo told me was from them, so I guess they got it?
Overall rundown of businesses I contacted:
- First Direct bank, mandatory phone line, but dedicated to bereavement. Not bad
- John Lewis bank — now use Settld, no comment
- M&S bank — I used the online form
- BT broadband — I called them, no dedicated line. Should have used online form. They said I could inform them I wanted to close the contract with no penalty within 30 days of this notification, I would then have another 30 days of contract
- Facebook — they have a function where you can nominate someone to inform FB of your death and turn your account to memorial, but I didn’t activate it before my mum died and I worried (why??) that FB would know I conned them. I filled in a separate form that required me to provide proof of address, the account is now memoralised. It’s where a lot of my mum’s friends are, so this was very good. They acted within 24 hours of being notified
- Ebay — fully online business, just clicked buttons to close my mum’s account. Easy
- Just giving — as above
- Guardian — as above
- Netflix — as above
- Paypal — as above
- Natural Trust — had to email normal Contact Us email. The bank would have cancelled direct debits, I guess
- Octopus energy — they’re signed up with a company called LifeLedger, which I think must be like Settld. I didn’t see a benefit to doing this for one company. I use Octopus. I emailed them, and they were happy to just move my mum’s account to mine.
- LV home insurance — I rang them, they dealt with it in one call, and also gave me a refund
- Dial Direct car insurance — they didn’t have a bereavement line, but they did have a bereavement team, so they had to call me back. Ugh. I did manage to take this call, though. They added me as a named driver for no extra cost and gave me 30 days from notification, then they closed the account. I got a refund as a cheque.
- Southern Water — I filled in an online form, they transferred it to my name
- Audible — distributed unused credits to my brother and partner, then closed account.
- Teachers’ Pension — I rang, filled in a form and emailed it, received money in my bank. Nice operator, terrible service, see above.
Closing remarks
I’ll be back soon with more thoughts about how the government might improve its service offering.
You in no way have to, but if reading this post made you want to donate in memory of my mum we have two JustGiving pages:
