From people who lived through it.

The phone sat on the kitchen counter for eleven days before I gave up on it. I knew the first four digits of his passcode — I’d watched him type them a hundred times waiting for coffee — but never the last two. I tried his birthday. I tried mine. I tried the year we got the dog. After five wrong tries the screen made me wait a minute, then five, then fifteen, then an hour. I stopped before ten, because I’d read that the tenth could erase everything.

Everything routed through that phone.

The bank in Pasadena texted a code I couldn’t read. Delta texted a code I couldn’t read. The pediatrician’s portal sent a verification link to the email whose password lived inside the phone. I sat at the table at six in the morning with a notepad listing everything I needed to get into and a pen I kept clicking, because the list got longer the more I thought about it, not shorter.

A friend who works in tech told me, gently, that there was no back door. Apple wouldn’t open it. The Genius Bar wouldn’t open it. A court order might get me into his iCloud account eventually, with the right paperwork, but never the phone.

I drove the phone to my brother’s house and asked him to put it in a drawer because I couldn’t look at it anymore. Six digits. That was the whole wall.

I don’t blame Sam for not telling me. We were thirty-four. People our age don’t write down their passcode. I wish someone had told us we were supposed to.

Daniela, Pasadena · eighteen months on

What I remember most is opening drawers.

I opened every drawer in the apartment in the first week, looking for something that wasn’t there. A folder. A binder. Anything that said, here is where the will is, here is the name of the lawyer, here is the safe deposit box and which bank holds it. My partner had been the organized one. He had labeled the spice jars. He had alphabetized the bookshelf. I assumed, the way you assume the floor will be there when you step, that he had also done this.

He hadn’t. There were Post-it notes in three different drawers, in three different handwritings of his, none of them dated. There was a manila envelope in the second drawer down with old tax returns and one expired passport. There was a ribbon-tied bundle of letters from his grandmother in the desk in the spare room, which made me sit on the floor and cry for an hour, and then get up and keep looking.

The will turned out to be in a safe deposit box at a Wells Fargo on Geary Street that he had mentioned exactly once, in a conversation about his cousin, two years before. I found a key in a coffee tin.

It was a month before anyone told me that California lets you open a box like that with the key and a death certificate, just to take out the will, with someone from the bank watching. I spent that month thinking I needed a judge.

I am not angry with him. I am furious at the version of us that thought there was time.

Yuki, San Francisco · three years on

The hospital social worker handed me a folder with a card inside it for a funeral home and a printed sheet titled What to Do in the First 48 Hours. I read it in the parking garage with the engine running. It said: notify the employer, request death certificates, contact the executor of the estate. I did not know who the executor was. I did not know where the will was. I did not know if there was a will.

I called my mother-in-law on the way home. She thought there was a will from when the kids were born.

She thought it was at a lawyer’s office in Santa Rosa. She did not remember the lawyer’s name. She said she would look. It took her four days to find the lawyer’s name in an old Christmas card. The lawyer had retired in 2019. His files had been transferred to a partner who had since moved firms. The partner’s office returned my call on a Thursday in week three. They had the will. It named me, which I had assumed, and named a guardian for the kids, which I had not known.

The kids were six and nine. I told them on a Saturday. I had wanted to tell them in the first week.

It took me until the third week to know enough to say it right.

Renata, Petaluma · two years and four months

The funeral home asked me how many certificates to order and I said five, because that’s what my mother had said when my grandfather went, and it had been enough. It was not enough. I learned this the way you learn most things that year — by running out of something at the worst possible moment.

Fifteen, not five. I tell every friend now. I ordered the second batch in week three and they took six weeks to arrive, which meant the brokerage account in Connecticut sat frozen through the holidays.

Which meant the estimated tax payment didn’t go out, which meant a letter from the IRS in March that I opened in the parking lot of a Trader Joe’s and read four times before I understood it. Each certificate cost twenty dollars. The mistake cost me a quarter.

I called the Social Security number thirteen times that first month. Each call was forty minutes on hold and six minutes of actual conversation, and at the end of it I had to fax — fax, in the year of our lord — a document to a number that was busy more often than not. I started keeping a spreadsheet. Bank, contact, certificate sent, certificate returned, account closed, balance transferred.

By April it had ninety-one rows.

People kept asking how I was holding up. I was holding up like someone with a second full-time job they didn’t apply for.

Cy, Hartford · the year after my father

The two-factor codes were what broke me.

Not the grief — the grief was its own animal, and I was learning, slowly, how to live next to it. It was the codes.

Every account I needed to close required a code, and every code went to a phone I could not unlock, or an email I could not log into without a code from the phone I could not unlock.

The auto insurance went to voicemail.

The brokerage said they would mail a paper form. The credit card company asked me to verify the last four of his social, then the address on file, then the security question, which was the name of his first pet, which I knew, and then a code sent to the phone, which I did not have. I asked to escalate. I was escalated to someone who asked the same questions in a kinder voice and ended the call by saying, I am so sorry for your loss, and I cried into the receiver because she meant it.

The mortgage company was the worst. The mortgage company was also the kindest, in the end.

A woman named Diane in Phoenix called me back on a Wednesday afternoon, after I had emailed her supervisor twice, and she said, We are going to do this together, and she stayed on the phone for an hour and forty minutes while we worked through it.

I sent Diane a card at Christmas. I do not know if she remembers me. I will remember her for the rest of my life.

Aaron, Minneapolis · the second year

The subscriptions kept arriving. That is the thing no one warns you about. Long after the funeral, after the certificates, after the lawyers and the brokerage and the slow cleaning out of the closet — the subscriptions kept arriving.

A Patagonia catalog in November addressed to him. A reminder that his Audible credit was about to expire. A magazine he had liked, about birds, that I let renew for a year because I could not bring myself to call them.

I made a list at the kitchen table on a Sunday in December, three months in. Forty-one things. The streaming services. The two newspapers. The wine club he had joined in 2022 and forgotten about. The gym he had not gone to since the pandemic. Each one wanted me to call, on a weekday, between nine and five, with the account number, which I usually did not have. Each call took twenty minutes. The wine club asked, with no irony, whether I would like to keep it as a tribute.

I cancelled what I could. I let some renew. The bird magazine still comes. I read it sometimes, on the porch, in his chair.

Beatrice, Asheville · four years on

My mother left me a binder. Not a metaphorical one — a physical one, blue, three-ring, sitting on the third shelf of the bookcase in her sewing room with my name written on a label on the spine. I didn’t know it existed until my aunt mentioned it the day after, the way you might mention a casserole in the freezer.

Inside, in her handwriting, was every account she had, the name of her lawyer in Tucson, the policy number for the life insurance, where the deeds were, who held the mortgage.

At the front was a page that said, in pencil, You will not need most of this for a while. Take your time. Eat something. Call Aunt Pat first, she knows where the original will is.

I called Aunt Pat first. She did know.

The binder was wrong about three things — a credit card she’d closed in 2023 was still listed, the phone number for the lawyer had changed — and right about everything else.

It saved me a winter of paperwork. It didn’t save me from grief; nothing does. But it meant the grief was the only thing I had to do.

I am writing this so you understand what it is I am trying to leave for my own kids. Not perfection. Just a place to start when they don’t know where to start.

Marcus, Tucson · the second spring after

I am the one who was supposed to be left to. My grandmother named me as the person to call. She told me twice, on Sunday afternoons, the kind of detail you nod at and then promptly do not write down because she is seventy-eight and gardening and there is plenty of time.

When the call came, I drove the four hours to her house and let myself in with the key she had taped to the underside of the porch railing, which was the only thing I knew for certain.

I made coffee I did not drink. I sat at her kitchen table and I had no idea what to do. There was a folder in the desk drawer marked, in her hand, FOR WHEN. Inside it was a single sheet of paper. The lawyer’s name. The bank. A note that the safe deposit box had been moved in 2021 to the branch on Main and that the second key was inside her jewelry box. A line at the bottom that said, You are doing fine. I love you. Make a sandwich.

I made a sandwich. I cried at the table for a long time. Then I started, and the folder told me where to start. That is all you need a folder to do.

Kavya, Worcester · last winter