Someone has just died — what to gather first

If you're reading this in the first week, you have too much to do and no attention to spare. So: the short version is at the top, and you can stop after it.

Gather the voicemails, the videos on other people's phones, and the names of the people in the photographs. Everything else will still be there in six months. Those three won't.

That's the whole thing. The rest of this page is why, and how, when you have a spare hour.

Why those three

Almost everything a person leaves behind is patient. Letters, furniture, the box in the loft — none of it is going anywhere, and you are allowed to leave it alone until you can face it.

Three things are not patient:

Voicemails are deleted by the phone company on a schedule nobody tells you about — often thirty days, sometimes less. If there is a saved message from them on anyone's phone, that is the most fragile recording of their voice in existence. Get it off the phone this week.

Video on other people's phones disappears through ordinary attrition: a lost handset, a full storage plan, an upgrade. Nobody deletes it deliberately. It just stops existing, one phone at a time, and there is no moment where anyone notices.

The names of people in photographs live in exactly one place, which is inside the heads of the oldest people still here. A box of unlabelled photographs is a box of strangers within one generation. This is the one that is genuinely irreversible, and it is the one nobody thinks of.

How to do it without making it a project

The voicemails. Ask everyone in the family to check their saved messages today. Most phones let you share a voicemail as a file. If yours doesn't, the low-tech version works fine: play it on speaker and record it on another phone. It sounds worse. It exists, which beats sounding better.

The video. One message to the family group: "if you have any video of Dad on your phone, send it to me, even if it's three seconds and mostly the ceiling." You will get things you have never seen. The three-second ones are often the ones people watch most, because they're the only footage where nobody is performing.

The photographs. Put the box on the table with whoever is oldest, press record on your phone, and go through them asking who everyone is. Do not try to write it down — you'll stop after nine. The recording captures the names and the stories that come with them, which is more than a label ever would.

An hour of this is worth more than any other hour you will spend on their things.

What can wait

Nearly everything.

The paperwork has deadlines but they're published, and there are people whose job is to help you meet them. The house can wait. The clothes can wait — and if anyone tells you otherwise, they are managing their own discomfort, not helping with yours. Deciding what to keep is a task for a version of you that has slept.

Do not throw anything away in the first month. You cannot tell yet what will matter.

When you're ready, not before

At some point — a month, a year — you may want to gather what exists into one place: the recordings, the photographs, the recipes in their handwriting, the story about the boat that everyone tells slightly differently.

That is a different job from this one, and there is no schedule for it. Some families do it at the first anniversary. Some never do, and that's a legitimate answer too.

But if and when you get there, the material has to still exist. Which is why the list at the top of this page is short, and why it's worth doing now, badly, rather than later, properly.

One thing worth saying

People often feel they have missed the moment — that they should have asked more while there was time. Almost everyone feels this. It is not a sign that you did it wrong.

What's left is usually more than you think. Voicemails nobody remembered. A cousin's phone with four minutes of a wedding. A recipe card in handwriting you'd know anywhere.

Start with what exists. It's more than it looks like from here.