Death is inevitable but we still seem flummoxed by it happening. We have all kinds of End of Life policies and procedures which do everything possible to make life difficult for those left behind.
Our language is around loss and unexpected, and grief and being bereft.
Why do we make Death so hard to process in our community and what can we do to normalise it across society?
If your partner dies before you do, consider what happens to your joint mortgage, your internet, email and phone accounts, your car repayments, if it’s coming out of a joint account that’s suddenly frozen because one account holder has died.
What happens if your partner sets up your home network and TV subscriptions and their email account is locked because you’re not the account holder.
For example, Netflix doesn’t have “multiple account holders” as an option, it belongs to one person, the one who pays the bill. Neither does Google, Facebook, Disney, Amazon, Apple, or anyone else.
This is repeated across every single aspect of modern life. Your robot vacuum cleaner is linked to a single person, as are your IoT lightbulbs. It’s absurd.
The list goes on, public transport payment system, car ownership, home ownership.
I know people who have had to borrow money from family and friends, just to eat food because the bank needed a death certificate after their partner died, but the process took weeks, some even months.
One person was an executor of their recently deceased parent who was required to produce the non-existent death certificate for the other parent who had died 40 years earlier. Took more than a year.
Dying during a holiday is a special form of torture for the family.
None of that is easy, convenient or handled.
Why not?
This may depend on jurisdiction. Joint accounts were not frozen in my case. A death certificate was only required to remove the deceased party from the accounts.
In my case I was able to present the death certificate to the providers and the accounts were quickly closed, with the appropriate billing and hardware returns. It was no more inconvenient than a normal return.
I was fortunate. The deceased planned ahead and did all of the things I haven’t done: arranging a funeral and burial, keeping their will up to date, writing down their usernames/passwords, and making the appropriate joint bank accounts.
My experience was with established services in mature sectors: they have procedures for dealing with deceased customers’ accounts. It was relatively convenient, even at a really shitty time.
Newer services don’t have that institutional experience. They haven’t existed long enough. But they’re starting to: Facebook has the concept of deceased users. As time goes on, more “new” services will as well.
FYI, in at least parts of Canada, a vehicle can be jointly owned by spouses.
As are mortgages, car loans, and insurance.