When Someone Dies: A Plain-English Guide to Funerals, Costs, and Your Rights - Softcover

Fleet, Alex

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798189761584

Publisher: Independently published, 2026

Synopsis

The calls come before you are ready, and the first bill arrives before the grief does.

This is a short, plain-English guide to the days between a death and the beginning of the estate. It is written for the person who has been handed the job — usually while exhausted, usually without warning — and it is ordered the way the decisions actually arrive.

What it covers, in sixteen brief chapters:

• The first calls, and the first forty-eight hours — who to ring, in what order, and what genuinely cannot wait until morning.
• Burial, cremation, or donation — what each involves, what each costs, and how to decide without being rushed.
• Your rights at the funeral home — the federal Funeral Rule entitles you to an itemized price list and forbids certain bundling. Knowing that one fact changes the conversation.
• Paying for it — what things actually cost, what you are not obliged to buy, and where the money can come from.
• The paperwork week — death certificates and how many you need, who must be notified, and what can safely wait.
• When it is not the ordinary case — and the people who prey on the newly bereaved.

It ends with a day-by-day checklist and call scripts you can read down the phone.

Where it stops: at the estate. Probate, letters testamentary and the final accounting are a different job and a different book, and this one hands you over by name when you reach that line. It is a concise guide — roughly 34 pages — meant to be read in one sitting and used the same day, not a comprehensive treatise, and not legal advice about your situation.

Edition details

• Publisher: Independently published
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798189761584
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 34