So many things to start organising.

When someone dies you expect to be consumed with grief but what you may not understand is that there is a lot of admin to take care of alongside the grief, especially if you are the executor of the will.

This admin is numerous and overwhelming:-

• Get death certificate
• Register death (if its an unexplained death you can’t until you receive the full death certificate)
• Funeral arrangements
• Tell all financial and service providers, banks, utilities, council etc……
• Deal with the estate and all the vultures that will start circling before the dead persons body is even buried
• Find the will

This is just a shortened list, the actual list goes on for ever and ever. In the first month after my brothers death it was a full time role working all day everyday until a big enough dent had been made in it.

So, rather appropriately, on the Monday morning 2 days after my brothers death, I started working on all of this whilst at the same time trying to deal with the unfathomable depths of the pain we were all feeling.

Institutions are very well versed in being sympathetic when you first contact them and all of them were very nice but after you have said the same thing over 50 times it starts to wear very thin and you just want to get off the call, have a breather, cry and get back to it.