🗝️ Module 13 — People to Notify and Messages to Leave | Dying: Getting Things in Order Course
Free Course by Everything IFS Academy | Death and Dying Series
Module 13 — People to Notify and Messages to Leave
Every lesson in this course so far has been about things: documents, accounts, houses, belongings. This one is about people, the layer where getting things in order becomes most plainly an act of love. It teaches the notification list that makes sure no one is forgotten in the fog of the first day, the equally important permission to leave people off it, the appointed caller who spares the closest person from saying the words forty times, the institutions that need a call, the practical mechanics of letters and recordings left behind, and the question of the obituary, including the option more people are quietly choosing: writing it themselves.
The Notification List
When a death comes, even an expected one, the first day passes in a fog, and in that fog the family must somehow remember and reach everyone who should hear the news. They reliably cannot. Hospice bereavement workers hear the same regret over and over, weeks later: "We forgot to call Joe. He found out from the obituary, a month after the funeral, and it broke his heart." Not from carelessness. From fog.
The notification list is the cure, and it is one of the simplest documents in this entire course: names, phone numbers, and the relationship, written in roughly the order the person would want them called. The relationship column matters more than it looks, because the list's reader may not know who "Harriet" is; "Harriet, my college roommate, we talk every Sunday" tells the caller everything, including how gently to dial.
Two categories deserve deliberate effort, because they are exactly the people fog erases. First, the far ring: the army buddy, the old neighbor from the house before this one, the friend overseas, people deeply loved and entirely unknown to the immediate family, unreachable through any contact list but this one. Second, a practical note about where numbers live now: in a phone, which, as the digital life lesson of this course taught, may be locked. The notification list belongs on paper, in the letter of instruction or beside it in the folder taught in the papers lesson, where no passcode stands between it and the people it names.
Who Does Not Need to Be Notified
Here is the permission half, and it is just as much a part of getting things in order: not everyone gets a phone call, and that is allowed. News of a death naturally travels in tiers, and choosing the tiers in advance is a courtesy to everyone, including the news itself:
The call is for the inner ring: the people who should hear a human voice, before anything appears anywhere. The list above is mostly this tier.
The text or message serves the wider circle honestly and well: the coworkers, the book club, the cousins three branches out. Nobody in this tier is insulted by it, and it spares the callers.
The card or note suits the long-distance and the long-ago, the people for whom a written word lands better than a startling call.
The obituary and the online word carry the news to everyone else, which is precisely what they are for.
And then the quietest line on the page, which this course states plainly because almost no one says it out loud: it is legitimate to name people who should not be contacted at all. The estranged sibling, the ex, the person whose chapter closed years ago. Writing "please do not notify my brother Stan; if he learns of it, that is fine, but no one owes him a call" is not cruelty; it is a boundary, kept to the end, and it spares the family from agonizing over an outreach the person never wanted. The family remains free, of course, but the written wish takes the question off their shoulders, which is the entire business of this course. Dying carries no obligation to stage reconciliations, and a person's peace is allowed to be arranged the way they actually lived.
The Notifier
Now the single most merciful appointment in this lesson. Someone has to make the calls, and by terrible default it becomes the person standing nearest the loss: the new widow saying the sentence again and again, forty times in two days, reliving the death in miniature with every ring, comforting each shocked caller in turn while her own grief waits. Ask anyone who has done it. It is one of the most exhausting tasks in all of bereavement, and it is completely transferable.
The notifier is the person appointed, in advance, to work the list: a steady friend, a sibling once removed from the epicenter, the family's natural organizer. The qualities are the familiar ones from the proxy lesson of this course, calm voice, reliability, the ability to repeat hard news without unraveling, plus one more: some knowledge of the circles being called. Larger lives often split the job naturally, one notifier per world: the work friend calls the work circle, the cousin handles the family branch overseas, each holding their slice of the list. A woman named Celeste asked her oldest friend Ruby to be her notifier, handed her the list at a kitchen table two months early, and when the day came, Celeste's husband made exactly two calls, to his children, while Ruby made thirty-one. He says it is the kindness he remembers most from that week.
Two practical gifts make the notifier's job humane. First, a script, one plain sentence written by the person themselves or the family: "I'm calling with sad news. Elaine died this morning, peacefully, at home. The service details will come in a few days." Having the words prevents the caller from inventing them forty times. Second, a modern instruction for the inner ring: please hold the news off social media until the list has been called. Every bereavement worker now carries stories of a daughter learning of her father's death from a cousin's online post, and one sentence, spoken at the first calls, prevents it.
The Institutional Notifications
Beyond the loved ones stands a short list of institutions, and a few lines in the letter of instruction turn this from a scavenger hunt into a checklist. The financial institutions, the banks, the card companies, the credit bureaus, and Social Security, which the funeral home typically reports as taught in the papers lesson, belong to the money and papers lessons of this course and are only named here. The remainder:
The employer, for anyone still working: a call to the supervisor and to human resources, because beyond the news itself there is final pay, benefits that may continue for a spouse, and very often a workplace life insurance policy the family would otherwise never know to claim.
The landlord, for renters, with the lease realities taught in the home and belongings lesson.
The clergy or faith community, early rather than late, both for the service and because a faith community mobilized is one of the great support systems on earth.
The doctor, the dentist, and the standing appointments, a small mercy that spares the family the reminder calls for visits that will not happen.
The clubs, licenses, and volunteer circles: the union, the professional association, the Tuesday card game, the shelter where the person walked dogs. These calls take minutes and prevent months of mail addressed to someone gone.
Messages You Want Left
Some words deserve to outlive their speaker, and this section teaches the practical mechanics of leaving them, the writing, the storing, the labeling, while the deeper craft of legacy, the ethical wills, the recorded life stories, the letter-writing projects, fills its own course in this series for anyone called to go further.
The mechanics are humbler than people fear, and the fear is worth naming because it stops so many: people delay these letters waiting to feel eloquent, and eloquence never schedules itself. The standard that actually matters is the one every recipient confirms: a real letter, in the person's own handwriting, in their plain everyday voice, beats a polished essay by a mile. Three honest sentences, "I loved you completely. I was proud of you every day. Take care of your sister, and laugh at my jokes occasionally," will be read five hundred times and kept forever. Pen and paper carry the day here; the handwriting itself becomes part of the message.
Recordings work too, a voice saying the words, a phone video on a good afternoon, with one technical caution from the digital life lesson of this course: a recording trapped in a locked phone or a lapsing cloud account is a message undelivered, so recordings get copied to where the family can actually reach them, the shared album, the drive in the folder.
Then the two details that turn messages into a system. Storage: the letters live in the folder taught in the papers lesson, and the letter of instruction states that they exist, since an undiscovered letter comforts no one. Labeling: each envelope carries a name, and, where wanted, a time, because the label "open when" is one of the most quietly powerful tools in this whole territory. Open now. Open on your wedding day. Open when the baby comes. Open on a hard day. A man named Stan left his teenage granddaughter a small bundle, one envelope per milestone through her twenties, and she reports that knowing unopened ones still wait has felt, for years now, like he is still slightly ahead of her on the road. That is the practical magic of a label: it lets love arrive on schedule, long after the sender has gone.
The Obituary
The lesson closes with the public words, and the news here is that there are three honored choices, not one.
The first, chosen more often than people realize: write it yourself. Nothing prevents it, funeral homes receive self-written obituaries regularly and gladly, and the advantages are real: the facts come out right, the tone comes out true, and the life gets told with the emphasis its owner actually intended, including humor, which self-written obituaries famously deploy and which readers famously cherish. Some people write theirs as a final wink; some as a plain accounting; some as a thank-you note to the world. All of it is allowed.
The second choice, lighter and nearly as valuable: leave the notes. A facts page in the folder, birth date and place, parents' names, the schools, the jobs, the marriage, names spelled correctly, the things to be sure to mention, the photo to use, spares the family from doing genealogy on the worst week of their lives and prevents the small errors that sting in print. One practical line belongs on the notes page: newspaper obituaries are paid placements, often priced by length, while the funeral home's website and the online memorial sites publish at little or no cost, so stating a preference, "the paper version can be short; put the long one online," saves the family both money and second-guessing.
And the third choice, as legitimate as the others: none at all. Some people want no public notice, or only the briefest death announcement, and privacy, as the belongings lesson of this course taught, is a final wish like any other. Stating it plainly, "no obituary, please, just tell the people on the list," relieves the family of a duty they would otherwise assume. Like everything in this lesson, the gift is not any particular choice. The gift is that the choice was made, written down, and findable, so that the people left behind can spend the first days grieving instead of guessing.
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