What To Do When Someone Dies: A Timeline For The First Weeks

If you're reading this in the middle of it, start here: you don't have to do everything today. Most of what follows can wait a few days. A short list can't.

People in the funeral and estate industry commonly reference a figure close to 90 separate decisions and tasks that come up after a death. That number varies depending on who's counting and how, and no single study pins it down precisely. What's consistent is the shape of it: it's a lot, it comes in waves, and almost nobody expects how many of the tasks are organizational paperwork in addition to the funeral itself.

This guide is organized by when things need to happen, not by category, so you can find your moment and stop there for now.

The First 24 To 48 Hours

In the first two days, only three things are truly time-sensitive: getting the death legally pronounced, deciding on organ donation if it applies, and choosing a funeral home. Everything else on this page can wait.

Get a legal pronouncement of death. If it happened in a hospital or under hospice care, staff typically handle this. If it happened at home without hospice involved, call 911. This isn't a step you can skip or do later.
Check for organ donation status, on a driver's license or Advance Directive, if it's relevant. Timing matters here, so this is one of the few things that can't sit overnight.
Choose a funeral home, even if you haven't decided on services yet. They'll help with the death certificate, transportation, and next steps, and you can make the harder decisions over the following days.
Tell your closest circle. Immediate family first, then anyone who needs to hear it from a person rather than see it somewhere else.
Secure the home, if it's going to sit empty. Locks, mail, anything perishable.

Nothing on the rest of this list needs to happen tonight.

The First Week

Most of the first week is the funeral or memorial itself, plus a handful of paperwork steps that quietly need to start now even though nothing is due yet.

Order certified copies of the death certificate: more than you think you'll need. Ten to fifteen is a reasonable starting point; expect two to four weeks for them to arrive.
Locate the Will, if one exists, and note who's named as executor. You don't need to act on it yet, just find it.
Find key documents: Power of Attorney, insurance policies, deeds, recent bank statements. A folder, even a rough one, saves weeks of searching later.
Loop in an employer, if the person was still working, for final pay and any benefits.
Decide on the format of the service: traditional, memorial, celebration of life, graveside, or none, with whoever needs to weigh in. There's no deadline that requires rushing this by day two.

Who To Notify

Notifications generally fall into three groups, roughly in order of urgency: government agencies, financial institutions, and everyone else.

Fairly urgent (within the first couple of weeks):

Social Security Administration
The deceased's employer or former employer, for pay, pension, or benefits
Life insurance and health insurance providers
Banks and other financial institutions
The Department of Veterans Affairs, if they served

Important, but not urgent:

Credit card companies and lenders
One credit bureau (Equifax, Experian, or TransUnion). Notifying one typically flags the file at all three, and it helps prevent identity theft on unused accounts.
Subscriptions and memberships: streaming, gym, professional associations, anything on a recurring charge
Social media platforms, to request memorialization or removal of the account

Whenever it makes sense:

Friends, neighbors, and community groups
Professional contacts and clients, if self-employed

A practical shortcut: mail forwarding surfaces paper accounts, but if the person managed things paperlessly, their email inbox and recent bank or credit card statements will do the same job. Look for recurring charges and account notifications you wouldn't otherwise know to look for.

Digital Accounts

Reporting a death to a platform, where that applies, is usually the quick part. Deciding what happens to the account after that is the real question. Start by taking inventory: check the inbox and any password manager for a fuller list than you'd guess from memory.

Secure the email account first. It's what most other accounts use for password resets, so it's the account that unlocks the rest.
Check whether the person set up anything in advance, like Apple's Legacy Contact or Google's Inactive Account Manager. If so, the platform's own process is usually the fastest path in.
If nothing was set up, each platform has its own bereavement process for closing or memorializing an account, and it typically starts with a death certificate.
Decide per account, not all at once: some families memorialize a social profile so it stays up as a place to share memories; others close it right away. Neither is the correct choice, only the one that helps the people still living.

The Next Few Weeks

Once the service has happened, the work shifts from logistics to the estate itself. This is usually where an estate attorney becomes worth involving, if the Will names an executor or the estate needs to go through Probate.

Start Probate, if required. Whether it's required at all depends on the state and how the assets were held. Not every estate needs it.
Take inventory of accounts and property. Bank accounts, retirement accounts, real estate, vehicles, anything with a title or a beneficiary designation.
File any life insurance claims, which typically need a policy number and a certified death certificate.
Address taxes. A final personal tax return is usually still required for the year of death, separate from anything the estate owes.
Decide what to do with belongings, on your own timeline. There's no version of this that has to happen in the first month.

The Ones People Forget

The big, visible decisions get planned around. These are the ones that tend to get remembered at an inconvenient moment instead:

Pets. Who's feeding them tonight, not eventually.
Kids' routines. School pickup, activities, whoever usually handled the logistics.
Anyone who was depending on the person day to day: a tenant, a business partner, someone they were caregiving for.
Passwords. Without them, even routine account closures can turn into weeks of phone calls.
Cryptocurrency. If it's held on an exchange, it can be handled like any other financial account. If it's self-custodied, in a hardware wallet or noted only as a recovery phrase, there's no institution to call. Without someone else already knowing where that phrase or key is, it isn't delayed. It's gone.
Anything on autopay that isn't a subscription: a storage unit, a lawn service, a monitored alarm system.

Common Questions

Do I need a lawyer right away? Not usually in the first week. Once you're looking at Probate or a more complicated estate, an estate attorney is worth bringing in, but the first few days are about the person, not the paperwork.

How long does it take to get a death certificate? Typically two to four weeks for certified copies, though it varies by state and funeral home.

What happens to a bank account when someone dies? It depends on how the account was held. Jointly held accounts usually pass to the surviving owner. Individual accounts are generally frozen until the executor can access them through Probate, unless a beneficiary was named directly on the account.

Is it normal to feel completely overwhelmed by all of this? Yes. The volume of small decisions is real, not a sign you're handling it badly. Delegating what you can, and letting the rest wait, is the more common approach than doing it all yourself.

Some families put this list together after a loss. Others put a version of it together ahead of time, so the people they love have fewer of these questions to answer alone. That's what we're building Dandelion to do. Start my plan.

Dandelion is personalized, step-by-step estate and legacy planning for families, bringing legal paperwork, practical details, and personal keepsakes together in one shareable plan.

Dandelion is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice. This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. State laws vary. For advice specific to your situation, consult a qualified estate planning professional.