Beyond the farewell

Originally intended as a guide to the practical matters that need to be dealt with in the many months that follow someone’s death, beyond the immediate concerns (e.g., death certificate, funeral, pets), the aspects discussed are also applicable to ourselves at any age and any stage of life.

The guide may also be helpful:

Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Before end of life
  3. Beyond end of life
  4. What do you want to do for the rest of your life ?

0. Introduction

Motivation: There is plenty of support and information available for people who may be involved in the support or care of an individual with infirmity, long term sickness, have a disability or be elderly or in the latter time of their life. However beyond the loss of that individual there is little information or support beyond the farewell and hence the motivation for producing this guide.

It is based on my own experiences in Britain (United Kingdom) following the eventual and inevitable loss of both my elderly parents and my interaction with other ‘carers’. Consequently this experience also highlights matters for which it would be a great help to deal with before an end of life.

Although U.K. oriented it may be general enough to be a framework guide for most people anywhere globally.

The guide will be forever incomplete and probably a continuous work on progress anyway because everyone’s circumstances are different and I cannot think of everything! Hence…

✳️ Feedback welcome: with suggestions for improvement, additions or corrections, go to Issues on the project website and either click on an existing issue or open a New issue.

The guide is not advice, but intended to offer suggestions and stimulate thoughts and ideas on matters and issues that are relevant to your life or anyone at any age or stage of life, not just those approaching an end of life.

I hope it helps.

1. Before end of life

To make future matters easier these are some things to do, consider or arrange for future access well in advance of either the death or loss of mental or physical capacity of someone. To do so after EOL (End Of Life) would be difficult or too late:

Financial

Remember Power of Attorney is valid only whilst the person is alive.

Medical donation

Needs to be done weeks or months in advance of the loss of someone and may, or may not, need their permission if they have mental capacity to do so.

DNA Sample

Life Story, Family History, Family Tree

Whilst a person is still alive it is the last opportunity to find out more about their life, their life story, family history and perhaps document it and fill in gaps in the family tree… Who were those people you met in the past? Were they long lost relatives? Where do they fit in the family history and family tree? What’s the story behind that family heirloom?

Here are some suggestions and tools that may help:

✳️ Emerging technologies in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) may present us with other opportunities to preserve the life of someone, perhaps in the form of a digital model of them that we can talk with and interact with. While this is possible now it requires a high level of technical expertise that few possess, however tools for this may be developed rapidly and become more accessible and user-friendly.

Passing on the passwords, passphrases, passkeys, encryption keys, key pairs, brain keys, usernames etc:

With the agreement of the account holder consider becoming a joint account holder or administrator on the following, it will make matters easier to deal with beyond EOL.

Make backups !

Of course whilst a person is alive, well and able they would likely want to keep access details a secret, but how could they pass on the details to executors of a Will, family members or whoever in the event of EOL or loss of mental capacity or other loss of ability to use a computer?

How you do this will be your joint preference and depend upon your level of technical ability. A couple of thoughts:

Remember that Wills get published and made public on Grant of Probate, so the above information should not be included in or passed on via a Will.

Digital Assets, Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs)

Distributed Ledger Technologies are a relatively new technology, gaining prominence with the creation of Bitcoin in 2009. It is increasingly likely people may hold these digital assets in the form of:

These assets may be held in digital wallets (eg. Bisq or Exodus) or on exchanges (eg. Binance). Access to them may require:

If those are lost the asset (money!) is lost with no means of recovery, so…

Make backups !

✳️ The digital asset value may or may not be potentially significant:
For example, using the Bitcoin long term power law as a guide, the approximate minimum price for a whole Bitcoin in November 2022, was US$15,500 (~£14,000). In 2028 that minimum is projected to be US$100,000 and sometime between 2028 and 2037 potentially reach US$1,000,000, a significant increase.

Pets 🐕 🐈 🐦 🐝 🦕 🐍 🐇 🦖

What should happen to pets after their owner loses capacity or dies ?
What are the owners wishes for the pets future ?
Arrangements need to be made in advance.

Where is the paperwork ?

See Important Paperwork in the next section. Knowing this can ease the process of finding the paperwork later.

2. Beyond end of life

Matters to attend to beyond the immediate matters following someone’s death.

This may be a challenging time with an overwhelming number of things to deal with and feel surreal in the new reality. It may be filled with mixed emotions and a lifetime of memories as you deal with matters and sorting out.

Government website & Tell Us Once

Amongst the first things to be done is follow the government website guide What to do when someone dies: https://www.gov.uk/when-someone-dies.

This includes the Tell Us Once service to notify multiple government departments and organisations, however consider carefully which to include. https://www.gov.uk/after-a-death/organisations-you-need-to-contact-and-tell-us-once

It may be wise to notify the DVLA separately as changing the details in the Log Book will end the current vehicle tax and you would be unable to drive it on public roads. The LOG Book changes may take six weeks to process.

Probate, Estate, Inheritance Tax and Property Records

These are included in the government guide.

Support ends suddenly

Support from care worker visits, health visits, council and government support, telephone support from various charities and agencies all come to an end quite suddenly. You no longer have contact with these support people you have got to know and it may leave you feeling isolated, cut off, alone and forgotten about.

Need someone to look after YOU

Depends upon your circumstances, health and age, but if you are the only one left living in the house, who is going to look out for you or look after you ?

The letter box or post box 📨 📬

Letters or mail arriving in the post can be a help in identifying overlooked matters to deal with or of organisations to notify of the death.

However, there may also be unwanted or unneeded promotional advertising mail, a possible way to reduce or stop this is to write Deceased - Return to sender on the envelope and return it in the post box.

Return support equipment

For me this was fairly straight forward.

Financial

Investing inheritance - financial

If sufficient finance is left over, consider putting the money to use to earn interest, eg.:

Medicines ⚕️

Unused, part-used or old medicines should be taken to a pharmacy for disposal.

Do not dispose of medicines in the waste bin, wash down the sink or flush down a toilet, as that would contaminate the environment, enter the food chain, harm wildlife, plants, animals, food and humans!

Physical personal items

These are part of the Estate.

It is likely thee will be a large number of items to find new home for, eg. clothes, electrical and electronic items, furniture, tools, plant pots, garden equipment, timber, hobby items, vehicles.

Hidden Items

There may be important notes, paperwork, stash of cash, information and other items of importance hiding about the property:

Important Paperwork

Digital data, computers, online accounts, etc.

Lost passwords, Data recovery

If you are not technically or computer literate you may need help recovering data or account access etc.
A local Linux User Group may have members able to help you.

Photographs

Whilst nearly all the world has turned to digital photography now, film and print photographs remain. These may contain precious memories and be a record of a person’s life, family and history.

Be careful with their handling, preservation and storage, hence…

Protect the source material !

These may be the only photographs in existence with no other copies.

The source print and film photographic material will degrade over time, to slow that process care should be taken with its preservation and storage, for example, store photographs between acid-free paper as normal paper may be acidic and accelerate degradation.

The Preservation Equipment Ltd. organisation has materials to help and their website may also inspire some other ideas in you.

Some notes, tools and ideas to help:

Preserving their legacy …how ?

Perhaps the deceased produced some creative work from their hobbies or work that are worth preserving. How will people know about their work and what they did unless it is made visible by some means. What are your options?

Eg. amongst the many practical skills my father had, one of his hobbies was artwork painting, especially portraits and landscapes. How can I make his artwork publicly known, visible, preserved and permanent?:

Cognitive Bias

Be aware of cognitive biases, they can lead to irrational or inaccurate judgements and affect you throughout the processes covered by this guide.

We have cognitive biases throughout our lives, often not consciously aware of them. They are numerous, take a look at this chart on the Wikipedia Cognitive bias page. Everyone’s circumstances are different, so in the context of this guide let me give you some examples of my experience from my own circumstances:

✳️ It was a mighty personal challenge dealing with the contents of my late parents house, about 20% of if it was either of sentimental value or useful, so that was okay, but it was the 80% I did not need was where I faced my challenges and cognitive biases. Although I gave a lot to local charity shops I was left with feelings of :

So I asked one of the large language models available to us now (see Resources below) to help me identify what cognitive biases I may be facing and experiencing, given my above feelings and circumstances. It suggested quite a few:

  1. Endowment effect: You’re placing a higher value on items simply because they belonged to your parents, even if they’re not objectively valuable or useful to you.
  2. Loss aversion: The fear of losing something valuable by giving away your parents’ possessions is stronger than the potential gain of freeing up space and time.
  3. Sunk cost fallacy: You’re considering the time and effort your parents invested in acquiring and maintaining these items, making it harder to let go.
  4. Emotional attachment bias: Your sentimental connection to the items is overriding rational decision-making about their practical value or necessity.
  5. Status quo bias: The tendency to prefer things to stay the same is making it difficult for you to make changes to your living situation.
  6. Anchoring bias: Your initial perception of the items’ value (based on your parents’ respect for them) is influencing your current assessment of their worth.
  7. Opportunity cost neglect: You’re focusing on the perceived loss of giving items away rather than considering the benefits of freeing up your time and space.
  8. Analysis paralysis: The overwhelming nature of the task and the multiple options available (sell, donate, keep) may be causing decision fatigue.

You may face some of these and other cognitive biases yourself, being aware of them can help towards dealing with your own circumstances and matters.

3. What do you want to do for the rest of your life ?

Now you have the above sorted, what about you?
It could be a time of freedom and opportunity to pursue your life!

Career

Aim at what you want. If you are older, avoid wasting time with ‘fill in occupations’, use your precious years with ambition.

Finance, Pension, Income ?

Resources

Generative AI Tools

May assist you with matters you are dealing with related to this guide. They can be helpful and are easy to use despite their technical-sounding names such as Large Language Models (LLMs) or Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT). Simply enter a question, known as a prompt, and press enter.

Generative AI systems, emerged in 2023, they may be used for interactive ‘discussion’, however you should independently verify the responses and try asking the same question in a different way and on different platforms or language models.

Here is an example of asking a question to a generative AI system about probate.

These are some LLMs you may like to try:

If you would like to learn more about interacting with language models refer to promptingguide.ai.

Acknowledgements

Creative Commons Licence
Beyond the Farewell by Keith White is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://github.com/beyondthefarewell/beyondthefarewell.github.io.