My Parents Are Dead: What Now?: A Panic-Free Guide to the Practicalities of Death

by Becky Robison

Overview

A certified death doula provides an accessible and digestible guide to dealing with the legal, financial logistical hurdles of a parent's death—without losing your sense of humor.

Whether you’ve recently lost a parent or you're just trying to plan for the toughest day of your life so far, you’re probably experiencing a lot of dizzying emotions. Unfortunately, you’re also going to need to enter an overwhelming maze of paperwork and bureaucracy.

But you don’t have to do it alone.

After losing both parents, Becky Robison devoted herself to making death and postdeath logistics easier on others. She draws on her own experience, plus interviews with experts ranging from monument makers to morticians, to hold your hand through:

• Asking your parents about their end-of-life wishes while you can
• Getting a body buried, cremated, or donated to science
• Planning a funeral
• Securing a death certificate
• Dealing with your parents’ property—or debt
• Handling even more tricky issues you never wanted to be in charge of
• And still being able to laugh, a little, sometimes

Nothing about this is easy. The good news is you have someone on your side.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781683694694
Publisher:	Quirk Publishing
Publication date:	01/06/2026
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288

About the Author

Becky Robison is a writer and certified death doula living in Louisville, Kentucky. A graduate of UNLV's creative writing MFA program, she has been published in Salon, Slate, Juked, and elsewhere. After her parents died, she created My Parents Are Dead: What Now?—a website documenting her journey through the legal, financial, and bureaucratic aftermath in order to help others do the same. She continues to educate others about death and dying through her writing and public speaking.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction: Or, How I Accidentally Became an Expert on Death

Have you ever joked with your friends about how the boomers need to die already? I have. They own everything but they can’t rotate a PDF! They’re stuck in the Cold War! They’re destroying the planet! Look at the politicians running this country—they’re practically dead anyway! Insensitive? Sure, but I’m part of the first generation raised on the internet. Dark humor is how we roll. (And it’s how this book rolls, too. Figured it was best to throw you in the deep end right away.)

It’s not as fun when your own personal boomers die.

My mom, Nancy Robison, was a therapist. In fact, she started her own therapy business, Gurnee Counseling Center, which still exists today. Having a therapist mother is exactly as irritating as you think it is. Casual complaints become potential diagnoses. On the other hand, it was obvious how much she cared. I never had to lie or hide aspects of my life from her. She loved the beach, watching Jeopardy!, and spontaneously rewriting song lyrics to pertain to the situation at hand. But therapists have their problems, too. Hers was alcohol. She died of liver disease in 2020.

My dad, Dan Robison, was an architect. He also started his own business, but it couldn’t withstand the 2008 financial crisis. Afterward, he became an expert witness—we couldn’t walk into a building without him pointing out code violations. Considering he was a grumpy Republican, it’s amazing how open I (a cheerful socialist) could be with him, too. He loved golfing, hunting, fishing, and ABBA. When he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he refused to hear his (dire) prognosis—he was sure he could beat it out of spite. He died nine months later, in early 2023.

My sister and I became orphans in our thirties. Not young in the grand scheme of things, but young for having dead parents—or at least, that’s what people tell me. Every sympathy card echoed the sentiment: You’re so young. My parents were only in their sixties when they died. Their youth seems more unfair than mine. They actually had the money to retire and never got to do it!

But it’s true: Most of my friends still have their parents. Most of my friends have never had to write an obituary, or file a life insurance claim, or deal with probate court. The closest most of my friends have come to a mortgage is browsing homes they’ll never be able to afford on Zillow. Meanwhile, I inherited a mortgage, along with several guns, broken exercise equipment, cabinets full of expired pills, and thirty-four decorative fish.

As a generation, millennials tend to be open about our emotions. Long before therapy meme accounts dominated Instagram, we had LiveJournal and Xanga: We wrote our diaries in public, sharing the shadows of our inner lives with strangers on the internet. (Though I’ll admit, I was relieved when Xanga shut down and removed its archives, relegating my angsty teenage musings to the dustbin of history.) Millennials understand that it’s normal and healthy to grieve.

So when my parents died, I was prepared for my grief—but I was completely unprepared for the legal and financial ramifications. I knew there would be a will or a trust or something (both, as it turns out), but I could only conceive of a will in terms of what I’d seen on TV. Someone dies, and then their friends and family, appropriately dressed in black, gather in a stately room while an elderly lawyer reads a list of who gets what. In reality, my dad’s will was in a cardboard box next to the Christmas decorations. He did have a lawyer, who answered almost none of my questions. I didn’t even know if I was asking the right questions!

Normally I would have asked my parents, but my need for their advice didn’t make them any less dead. So I turned to the other boomers in my life: my aunts and uncles, my friends’ parents. They were old enough to have lost their parents—surely they would know what to do. While they tried their best to help me, they couldn’t remember the details. Grief dominated their memories, not paperwork. And many of them—older and with larger salaries than I will ever see—had hired lawyers or accountants to help them navigate the bureaucracy. How could I hire a lawyer to help me get the life insurance money without having the life insurance money to pay the lawyer?

Like any enterprising millennial, I tried asking the internet. I found some resources, but they were scattered on different sites and it was hard to tell how reliable they were. There were plenty of books and tools to help you get your own affairs in order, but not to get someone else’s affairs in order after they’d already died. And every state has different laws and regulations. My conservative father would be horrified to know how much his death has turned me against states’ rights. Why does selling his car in Florida require different paperwork than selling his car in Wisconsin?

Frustrated and more stressed out than during the three-year period I decided I was too cool for antidepressants, I tweeted what I thought was a joke: This is weird, but if I put together some kind of “Your Parents Are Dead: What Now?” guide with everything I learn during this depressing paperwork nightmare, would anyone be interested?

Turns out lots of people wanted this kind of resource. Like, an overwhelming number of people. My DMs blew up. I’d never gone viral before—it was kind of scary, even though the response was supportive rather than mean-spirited. Total strangers came to me with their stories: Their parents died when they were teens, their parents died last week, their parents were dying as they typed this message. The details were different, but the sentiment was the same: Resolving their parents’ estate was a bewildering source of pain and worry on top of their grief.

I’m a writer by trade and a notetaker by habit, so I thought—why not? If these randos on the internet could take my tweet seriously, so could I. And that’s how deadparentswhatnow.com was born.

Joke’s on me: Instead of having a full-time job and a surprise parttime job as the executor of my parents’ estate, I ended up with both of those and an additional unpaid part-time job running my website. But the website has brought more meaning to my loss than I thought possible. During her life, my mom improved the mental health of hundreds—if not thousands—of clients. My dad designed lasting structures that shelter people and foster community. It’s a lot to live up to! If my advice can make postdeath logistics easier for grieving people—well, it won’t make my parents’ deaths worth it. Nothing will. But it’s a way for me to honor their memory.

More than that, the website has allowed me to find my own community of people who get it. When you lose someone close to you—a parent, a spouse, a sibling, a friend, a child—you join a miserable-but-resilient little club that swaps bizarre coping mechanisms, unnervingly specialized knowledge, and jokes that seem offensive only to outsiders. We cry in public. We can describe the texture of cremains. We never want to receive another pity casserole. (We will eat it, though—who are we kidding?) I owe the site’s growth to my fellow mourners, who brought experiences outside my own into the picture, from unexpected autopsies to the horrors of selling a time-share. And now the website has grown big enough to become a book. Not exactly the book I thought I’d publish when I got my MFA in creative writing all those years ago, but it’ll have to do.

If you’re reading this, either you’ve joined the aforementioned club (welcome, and I’m sorry) or you’re about to (good luck, and I’m sorry). Or maybe you just like to be prepared, in which case we’ll extend you an honorary membership. It doesn’t matter—all our parents will die eventually. And as soon as they do, we will all be asked to max out our credit cards for a top-of-the-line casket.

Don’t worry. I’ve got your back.