January 21, 2025 • 56 mins
In this episode, Rachel, Jessica, and Tripp tackle the emotional and logistical challenges that come with losing a loved one. They share deeply personal stories of loss and emphasize the importance of planning ahead to ease the burden on those left behind.
Key highlights include:
- The inspiration behind The Dead Book—a comprehensive resource designed to simplify end-of-life planning and manage the administrative tasks that follow a death.
- How grief impacts both the heart and the mind, and why support systems are crucial during these times.
- Practical steps for organizing important documents and wishes to reduce stress for loved ones.
- Breaking down the stigma around death and encouraging more open, honest conversations about end-of-life planning.
- Personal insights on how preparedness can bring a sense of control and peace amidst the chaos of loss.
This episode is a heartfelt exploration of how planning ahead can not only ease logistical challenges but also allow us to honor our loved ones in meaningful ways. Don’t miss this important conversation on changing how we approach grief, death, and planning for the future.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Do you know how hard it is to die?
(00:02):
Are you overwhelmed with managing a loved one's affairs
after they're gone?
Do you even know where to start?
You're not alone, but finally,
someone is doing something about it.
In this episode, founders of the Deadbook, Brittany and Tripp,
dive into their journey,
innovating the future of estate planning.
Let's talk about getting your life and legacy in order.
Welcome, welcome.
(00:39):
We have Jessica and Tripp here,
which are the founders of the Deadbook.
We actually had posted a video with Kendall
talking about death certificates and its importance last year,
and it actually did really well.
And it made us think that a lot of people don't know
how much logistical things happen with grief,
(01:00):
but this is another whole part that often gets overlooked.
So when we saw what you guys were building,
we thought it was really cool and really useful.
So you're the first product we featured
on our podcast so far,
but we thought it was a really important product
to show people and to learn more about
because it is a really hard piece of grief and death
(01:23):
that doesn't get enough.
I feel like, and the limelight is the right word,
but just like enough shine for how important it is
and how much it affects the process.
So we're so happy to have you both here today.
Thank you for having us.
We're very passionate about this
and truly feel like we can change the conversation around,
not just death, but how you plan for it
(01:44):
and what you do when you're grieving
and how to administer an estate.
Yeah, thank you all for having us on.
We're excited to be here.
Yeah, so we can start off with, obviously,
we're talking about death and passing and loss.
And so, Tripp, you're the one who lost somebody
that led to this.
So do you mind telling us about the person you lost
and a little bit about your mother?
(02:05):
Something sweet, something that kind of brings her to life
for our listeners.
Yeah, my mother's name was Susan,
and man, she was just a force of life.
She was one of those just bright and happy people
that you just wanted to be around all the time.
She never met a stranger.
(02:25):
She could strike up a conversation with anyone.
And on top of all of that,
she was just the absolute best mom you could ever ask for.
She always knew just the right thing to say
and just the right moment.
You know, when I broke up with my middle school girlfriend
and thought the world was crashing around,
she always had that phlegm piece of advice
(02:46):
and that just continued throughout my whole life.
But she really, really was just this bright
and amazing person that's really increasingly rare
in the world.
And I just, I feel very honored to have her,
have had her as my mom and in my life.
(03:07):
Aw, thank you so much for sharing.
She sounds like a really lovely person.
The people we lose are so important to kind of how
we navigate our lives forward after they're passing.
So just a little moment to remember her
and obviously the legacy that she leaves behind.
Yeah, I mean, she left a huge legacy behind.
She always cared about people.
She always volunteered her time
(03:28):
and we're hoping to carry that legacy on.
I feel like grief can be channeled
into creating beautiful things for people in their honor.
Let's not talk about enough, like the aftermath
and just grief in general.
So anything that's changing the conversation is always
a positive.
So since this is a grief podcast, do you mind sharing,
(03:49):
I feel like the start of your grief experience,
you don't have to share like the details
of everything that happened,
but how has losing your mom shaped your grief?
Yeah, so the day, so I found her actually dead
in her kitchen and it just kind of ripped away my foundational
(04:11):
understanding of the world really.
You know, it just kind of tears apart that fabric
of what you think you understand
and just everything kind of ceases to make sense.
And, you know, for probably a few days afterwards,
I was borderline not comatose, but catatonic, I guess.
(04:33):
He was pretty much in a coma.
I've never cried like that in my life
and I hope I never do again.
And, you know, from there, it was just a lot
of kind of picking up the pieces
and just slowly kind of putting the pieces back together
and getting back up on my feet and kind of,
(04:54):
I said before on another podcast that we did,
just kind of that month or so after was kind of
like in a war movie where it's hazy and there's explosions
and the person's just kind of disoriented.
That's kind of what it was like for probably a few months,
was just kind of reorienting myself
and then trying to make sense of the world without my mother
(05:18):
who was an amazing person, was an amazing parent,
and was always my rock and helped me make sense
of things and situations that I didn't understand,
like just trying to figure out how to move forward
without that person that was such a huge part of your life.
Me and Kendall talk a lot about these images
that flash in your head,
(05:39):
and whether it's when they're passed away
or when they're really sick.
And it's like you wish you didn't have to see those anymore.
Like you could be just like sitting down on a random day
and that image will flash through your brain.
And it's really hard,
and people don't talk about that part enough,
it's like it is really hard to have those images in your head.
And they don't just go away.
(06:00):
Like they repeat and they flow through your brain
at a random time.
I can imagine that was a really hard experience.
Yeah, it was.
And you know, it still happens.
And you just, you got to kind of work with it when it happens, right?
Cry, whatever you need.
Yeah, so you know, I still have to go get a good cry in every now and then.
Yeah.
(06:21):
I'm a pro-crier at this point.
I don't know that I'm a pro yet, but I'm getting old.
Okay.
So Jessica, being married to Tripp
and him going through like this catatonic state of grief,
how was your role in all of this and supporting him,
managing things like at home and then work,
(06:42):
and then also learning that you're also really close with his mom?
This is your own grief as well that you're now dealing with.
So it's kind of like compounded in a way.
Yeah, I would say that my grief journey couldn't have been more different than Tripp's.
But I mean, that's normal.
Like we're not meant to have the same grief journey.
Nobody does and nobody will.
But for me, being so young, I mean, I was 31 when we lost her.
(07:07):
And I'm still just trying to figure out life.
So to have to go through this at such a young age,
that was really, really hard because nobody had ever been through it.
I had nobody to turn to.
I didn't know who I could go to for support to say,
how do you show up for your husband?
And I just kind of had to figure it out.
And no matter how much he explained to me what he was feeling,
(07:28):
because he's very good at that, like communicating,
I still couldn't feel the same thing.
And so for me, my grief very much looks like a busy body.
I was trying to, I don't want to say I was trying to forget what happened
because I very much wanted to keep her present.
But he couldn't get out of bed.
(07:49):
And I still had to walk the dog and make sure that, you know,
we were drinking water and eating meals when we could.
And just doing your daily routine gave me a sense of normalcy almost.
But I jumped back into that so fast because for me,
I felt like that's how I could best support him,
let him have the space and time he needed to grieve the loss of his mom.
(08:12):
And showing up for me was doing these household things.
But I do preface that by saying later on,
I did realize I never really gave myself the chance to grieve.
I cried in the shower one of those, nobody knows if I'm crying or not.
Is it water? Is it tears? I don't know.
And I kind of took that as, okay, well, you know, I had my chance to grieve.
(08:34):
Now I've got to like make sure that the house is moving forward.
And in reality, like I just never had the space to grieve her loss
the way I would have liked to.
But that's something that I will take going forward with me is like,
next time something like this happens, because it's going to happen to everybody,
I need to give myself grace too.
Like it's okay if the dishes pile up.
(08:56):
It's okay if the dog doesn't get a big walk every single day.
There needs to be space for everybody who's affected by the death of somebody.
Yeah. And I'll give Jessica a lot of credit.
She was my rock going through all of this.
And she made sure that things got done and I did what I needed to do.
And she basically looked at me one day and said,
you're not going to get through this by yourself.
(09:18):
I'm going to find you a therapist.
And she found me a great therapist to go see.
And that helped me tremendously.
But she immediately just put me on her back and just helped me get through it.
And I can't thank her enough, even though it was probably a little bit to her detriment
because she didn't get time to grieve until later,
but she just automatically clicked into,
I'm going to be your rock and get you through this mode.
(09:41):
It was pretty amazing.
Thanks, Shep.
You're welcome.
I will say, bringing up a therapist, like one thing I will say is,
if you are a spouse or a partner, even a child who has a grieving parent,
you're not meant to help them through their grief by themselves.
That's just not the reality.
I'm not equipped to professionally help somebody through grief,
(10:03):
and neither is anyone else out there unless you are a trained therapist to do so.
So going to see a therapist is more than okay and it's more than normal.
And if you have the means and ability to find a therapist, go.
Ditto.
Yeah.
We hear stories of grief where it pulls people apart or it puts a big toll on relationships.
(10:24):
I see so often in grief support groups where it's like, oh, someone died,
my partner isn't supportive, they don't get it,
they think that you should just be happy again and quote unquote.
And everything should go back to normal.
And I think that is a whole other discussion, but it's really hard.
Because it's not the same grief, right?
Like you said, you don't know exactly what he's going through.
He doesn't know exactly what you're going through.
(10:46):
And at the same time, you're just sad, right?
You're just trying to move forward and function.
So it's really a difficult, tricky situation that I think people don't take the time to like
dissect all the little pieces of it and how intricate it can be
and why so many people fall apart during this time
and why so many relationships, friendships end because of grief.
So it's good to hear a positive story about it and a good outcome.
(11:10):
Yeah.
Same.
I read on your website, your mom left essentially a dead book, right?
She had like a bunch of her documents together.
Is that correct?
So, well, one, that's amazing that she had the foresight to do that.
I think a lot of people avoid thinking about that.
But how did you handle even with that, right?
(11:35):
That's a lot more than people have to start with.
But how did you both handle with like the emotional and mental load of managing your mom's estate
on top of just grieving?
Because the grief process is hard, but then you have to like close bank accounts
and empty their house out, sell cars.
Like there's so many things that come along when someone passes away.
Like how was that handling both for you?
(11:56):
It's something that I worked with my therapist on and she set expectations up front
because I told her, you know, obviously everything has sentimental value,
whether it's a car or a pair of socks or like a chair in her house,
anything, her Sky Miles account, right?
So I talked with her early on and she gave me a really good piece of advice,
which is there's no time on this.
(12:20):
So take it at your own pace and, you know, do 25% of what you're feeling up for
and then do 50% of what you're feeling up for and kind of work your way up
and just kind of tackle the things in pieces.
No one likes the administrative back end.
It's opaque and it's cumbersome and it's antiquated.
(12:41):
And most of the people you talk to really don't do it that often
and not for want of trying,
but they can be unhelpful just because they don't do it that often.
And it can just be a frustrating experience going through the administrative process
while you're also trying to grieve because it can be a frustrating process.
(13:06):
Your emotions are already raw and just kind of picks at that open wound,
if you want to call it that, because it's aggravating and it's slow
and you feel like you're not making any progress.
But I just tried to take it one step at a time and treat it as more of a marathon
than just kind of a sprint to get everything done
and just did it at a pace that felt comfortable for me.
(13:29):
Yeah, I think I could add two things to that.
I think the job situation as a whole, I could talk about that for a really long time,
but having to administer in a state, it's a nine to five on top of your nine to five.
I mean, it literally takes every single weekend for months and months on end.
And Tripp's company treated him so well and gave him about three months off.
(13:55):
And I think having that space allowed him to do a lot of the administrative stuff.
And I think that's something that he felt when he felt ready,
because it's not like he had to come home from his corporate job and do it all.
He kind of had the space to do it.
And I would say the other thing is people want to support you and they want to rally around you.
And for anybody who's been through the state administration process,
(14:17):
you probably know that if you're the executor,
companies and corporations won't talk to anybody else but the executor.
And with Susan's debt book, I was able to help Tripp with the things that he gave me permission to help him with.
So little things like changing the credit card on the phone bill or, you know, the Sky Miles account, like calling Delta.
Even though they wouldn't talk to me because I had her passwords,
(14:39):
I could get in and do some of these tasks and allow him to have the space he needed to grieve or be in bed.
But also, even when it came to cleaning out the house,
her siblings wanted to come down and make it a like, have a glass of whiskey because she loved whiskey and help us pat.
You know, lean on people.
Obviously, like give them your permission before they administer something in a state if you're the executor of it.
(15:05):
But like people, people want to help you.
I love that. I wish someone told me that when I was going through a bulk of my father's administrative estate stuff.
It was same thing. It would keep me up at night.
I was trying to get it done really quickly because that's what everybody told me to do.
And then on top of that, not knowing how to do it, though, like I didn't have a guidebook.
(15:26):
I'm like, here's what you do next.
Or here's how you have to do this in order. The people you got to talk to.
So would you say that like this experience that y'all were going through led to inspiring the dead book
and how this idea and this concept could help other people?
So my mom had her binder and she called it her dead book because she had a sense of humor.
(15:50):
That was just who she was.
So she called it her dead book. It's probably a day or two after maybe three when I finally get out of bed and come downstairs.
You know, the day we found her, I asked Jessica to go into my mom's house.
I go upstairs to her office, go to the store, get this binder out.
And so we cracked it open and a lot like you kind of like no idea where to start, no idea what to do, who to contact, any of that.
(16:18):
And cracked it open and flipped through it. And I kind of knew what was in it because we'd been through it, my mom and I, years prior.
And it's one of those things where I kind of.
You don't want to think about it.
Yeah, you don't want to think about it. We're going through it.
And I was just kind of begrudgingly listening because I was like, all right, you got another 40 years.
(16:41):
I don't want to think about you dying. So I didn't really pay attention. Sorry, mom.
But, you know, I cracked this thing open and first thing was like a two page letter from her of.
This is what's in here. This is what you need to do with it.
These are the first things and just kind of waited a while.
I just took a deep breath and it's like, OK, like, even though she's not here, she's got me through this. Right.
(17:02):
She's so it gave me a lot of peace of mind.
It helped us tremendously through the process of just understanding what to expect.
And not only that, but having the documents and everything that I needed and all of that in front of me.
So, you know, through the course of doing all of this, had some family members and some of my mom's friends that knew she had the book, but didn't know what was in the book.
(17:28):
And they reached out and said, hey, like, I understand your mom had this book.
Can you tell me what was in it or can I see it?
Because I kind of need to get my stuff together.
Well, after probably the, I don't know, fifth or sixth one of those conversations, Jessica and I kind of sitting on our kitchen island one night and she goes,
(17:50):
this could actually help a lot of people, I think.
So we kind of started sniffing around and doing some market research and decided that, yeah, actually, this could probably help a lot of people.
Yeah, it was actually shocking when we were doing our market research.
There's really nothing out there.
I mean, there are some things, but overall, there's not a lot of resources, not a lot of information, not even products that help people through the administration part.
(18:16):
And the tools we did find were usually like government tools, which that's confusing and they're outdated.
And they were hard to understand from somebody who's just trying to grieve, you know, to like have legal language is not ideal.
Well, and hearing your story, sounds like your mother was already thinking ahead and thinking that she didn't want to impart the grief that you were already going to have to experience emotionally.
(18:42):
But then the grief and pain of having to figure out all the paperwork and trying to find this important paper that God knows where that is.
And at least she had the forethought.
I think to my situation with my dad where his loss, his passing was very sudden, we didn't have any of this stuff set up.
(19:03):
We had a few things, like if something were to happen in case of emergencies, I was I knew where to go.
But other than that, it was like starting at ground zero with nothing and no passwords to anything, not even knowing what accounts were attached to his credit card.
Like it was just like lifting up every single rock and not knowing what I was going to find.
(19:25):
And I think for myself, if I had this product, it would have saved me so many nights of just tears and frustration, trying to dig through piles of papers and figure out, OK, what do I got to do next?
Like, who do I need to call? How do I get this all organized and situated?
Yeah. And I mean, no one should be crying a night and be frustrated when they're already grieving the loss of a loved one.
(19:49):
Right. I mean, it just the process itself should not be as difficult as it is.
And that's a conversation for another time in another podcast.
I mean, that's just it's it's not fair to the family of the loved ones to have people crying at night, frustrated, trying to get through this process that they don't even want to be doing in the first place.
Yeah. I think to your comment, Jessica, of like people wanting to help and my family was super supportive and they wanted to know how to help.
(20:16):
I didn't even know how to have them help. I didn't even know where to guide them or I didn't even know how to ask for that or where to begin.
And I think even just with something simple as like a letter of like, here's how you do this in order.
Here's like maybe where to start. I would have had much more confidence reaching out to my younger sister and being like, OK, you could take on this task because I have to worry about these bigger balls.
(20:41):
You can handle this. My brother can handle that and kind of split up the responsibility of all of it rather than me feeling like the burden of all that was on my shoulders.
And like I had to be so responsible for it. Absolutely. I mean, I think it's hard to ask people for help.
This is one of the hardest things to do, especially when you're in like a very vulnerable state as to say like, hey, I'm raising my hand. I need help.
(21:03):
That's a really tough thing to do. But, you know, one thing I would encourage, just like you just said, Kendall, when it comes to like planning a funeral or if they had assigned like certain items in the household can go to like family members or loved ones or best friends or whoever it be.
Those are little things that people can help with. It's getting the flowers for the funeral or, you know, taking that ring that your sibling gets and getting it to her.
(21:30):
Yeah, I love that. That's great advice.
I'm so sorry that you went through that and carried that burden. I know that was heavy and tough.
Well, in this case, hearing about in very similar situations that y'all have created a product that hopefully reduces that anguish for somebody else in the future.
(21:51):
If you don't think you need it, I swear someone in your family will need it eventually because that's what I started thinking about. I called in an estate planner person around 28 and was like, hey, I think I need some documents just to like get stuff in order and just in case something happened to me.
And they're like, aren't you a little young to be thinking about dying? And I was like, I know, but like my dad passed away a few years ago and I know what it's like to not have this stuff.
(22:15):
So I don't want to do the same if something happened out of the blue to put that on my brother and sister because I know how much it sucked.
Yeah, not to be a Debbie Downer either. I learned this through like the estate administration process and just through starting the dead bug.
But technically, once you turn 18, you need your own will.
Wow. So there's I cannot remember the name. I wish I could. But there's a estate planning lawyer couple on TikTok and they talk about that all the time. Just trying to your generation.
(22:44):
Yeah, it's kind of an issue. And like a lot of my girlfriends are starting to have families who are young 30s.
And, you know, that's when I think a lot of people say, oh, OK, now I brought like life into this world. I need to do something to protect that.
And also, like you've been through this with your father. You're reaching out to a professional for help. And they're just like, oh, you're too young.
(23:05):
Well, I can start tomorrow. Like what? Well, anyway, I started to touch on.
Well, that's got a good segue into our next question. So for everyone listening, what exactly is the dead book and how does help people manage the overwhelming administrative tasks that follow a death?
Sure. So we are a central repository for all of the information and documents needed to administer an estate.
(23:31):
We have historically been a physical product, but in a few days, we will be launching our tech platform.
Congratulations. Thank you.
Based on user feedback, we're launching a tech platform.
So basically, with the tech platform, we're going to be able to build on the resources and we want to provide a lot of educational resources.
(23:52):
Right. So not only will the user be able to go in and store all of the information, like accounts and passwords, assets and liabilities, funeral wishes, items to leave behind,
documents, storage and all of that stuff will eventually bring the legal document creation in house.
So it's kind of a one stop shop for everything you need estate related, but at an affordable price and using approachable language and resources so that the person can also leverage those resources along the way and along their planning journey.
(24:25):
Research shows that a lot of people never make any sort of estate plan because they don't know where to start. It's intimidating. So we're trying to provide as many resources as possible to make the topic more approachable so that people can build this plan for their family and provide peace of mind once they are no longer here.
I think where our niche really is going to go though is having been through the grieving and estate administration piece where we hope to take dead book is more so for the back end, the resources for the back end really giving you a checklist on based off this person's dead book.
(25:00):
Here's exactly what you need to do in the first 48 hours, first week, first month, first three months.
And you'll see when we launch our tech platform that every single user can add to viewers to their dead book. And the critical information like passwords is completely locked down until they can prove that that person is incapacitated or has passed away.
(25:21):
But it allows us to really have that personal connection with those who are who are grieving the loss of somebody and actually walking them hand in hand through the state administration process.
Yeah, we don't want to be an online vault for information and documents. We also want to make this topic more approachable and we want to guide people through both the front end and you know also the back end as well.
(25:45):
This is so incredible and I think leads to what I'm thinking back when I was like in the midst of it and in the thick of grieving and in the thick of just like crying randomly at all the times was how inextricably intertwined the administrative part is with grief.
I remember thinking just getting mail with my dad's name on it. Instant tears like instantly. And I would be like, I thought I told you, I called you on told you that he died, I had to send you like a death certificate for some reason and then seeing like a piece of mail with his name on it would just be like a shot to the heart.
(26:21):
I know that feeling. I know that feeling well.
Yeah, or like the like phone calls you might get and they're like, Hi, I'm trying to reach so and so and you're like, Oh, well, he's been dead for a few months now. Like, good luck trying to find him try to find humor in the whole situation.
But yeah, it really sucks when it's like you're trying to figure out how to live your life now.
(26:43):
You're trying to compartmentalize your grief where you can and then all of a sudden you get a phone call or piece of mail that is linked to all this administrative work. It's just like it starts all over again. It's just a cycle of, of like, Oh, man, I just ripped open the wound and now have to deal with this again.
Yeah, that was, you're bringing it back up. I'm feeling it in my right now. Yeah, that was that was super tough. I got a lot of calls, people trying to buy my mom's house. I don't want to have this conversation or they're looking for her to just, I, I empathize with that. I know that feeling entirely too well.
(27:19):
Well, it's sad that we, we can relate on this. And unfortunately, a lot of people that are finding our podcasts are people in that window of intense grief right after a loss and just trying to find some sort of resource or support that can help them understand all of this and what they're going through.
(27:41):
And I'm sure you can relate that, like in that immediate moment of grief, you like, you don't know where your mind is at. Your brain is hazy. Like, good luck trying to make decisions on things.
You're so caught up with, Oh my God, I just lost someone super important to me. So do you have advice or insights to share with listeners, maybe in that very specific window of time on how they could prepare for this reality or what they could be doing to approach all of this that they might be having to take on?
(28:16):
Yes, I would. So here's a, here's a proactive piece of advice is have this conversation with your family members so that they have a plan in the immediate aftermath in that window of intense grief.
You know, immediately you kind of have to, you're faced with funeral plans and that's kind of something you immediately have to do.
(28:44):
They are a business and like the wedding industry, they will take advantage of your emotions. So go into that conversation with that framing, I guess, going into that conversation.
But as far as being in kind of the immediate throes of grief, it's gonna suck.
(29:07):
It doesn't really matter how you dice it and how you approach it.
You're going to feel weird ways that really you have no explanation for. You're going to be angry for no reason. You're going to be sad, you're going to be tired.
Some of those things are going to come together. Some are going to come individually. They'll mix and match and do whatever they want to do.
(29:29):
And sometimes it'll be intense and sometimes they won't. But it is going to be a weird time. It's going to suck.
And you need to give yourself grace to get through it.
If you're feeling angry and it's inexplicable, it is the grief. If you go outside and go for a walk, you know, just do whatever you need to do to get through it.
(29:54):
Because grief does weird things. You know, you hear about the five stages of grief and it's not true.
Sometimes they all come at once and it's going to be a weird time. Lean on your friends and loved ones and let people help you and just really focus on the love that's surrounding you to get through it.
(30:15):
Yeah. And I think to feel the emotions as much as you need to. Don't try to suffocate them. Don't try to push them down.
And going off of that, you don't have to show up for events. You're allowed to say no. You're allowed to take the time you need. If it's six months, it's six months. If it's six years, it's six years.
Like you're allowed to say no to events and happenings. Be honest with your boss at work. Like, hey, I'm having a really bad day and I just need a little more time on this project.
(30:48):
And also, just honestly, trim the fat. You're going to find through grief that there's a lot of people who will not show up for you, that you expected to show up for you.
It's okay to let them drop out of your life. And it actually helps you move forward because it opens the door for more people to come into your life and help you through it.
Yeah. People are not going to come through that you expect to and people you totally don't expect to or absolutely go into. And I experienced that. I don't know if you did or not, Kendall.
(31:20):
But another thing is as a society, we like to put some sort of finite timeframe on grief. Like, okay, it's been three months. You're cool now, right? Everything's fine.
There's no finish line really with grief. It's just something that's always going to be there and you learn to live with and it becomes part of your life as does the memory of the person you lost.
(31:43):
But it's false expectations to enter this process with. If I can just make it six months, it's all going to be better, I guess. It's going to be there.
It's going to be a marathon and just prepare yourself for that and lean on your loved ones.
Talking about the Deadbook, like what goes into it, how did you both decide what would actually be included in the Deadbook and what are some key features that you want to highlight?
(32:15):
Admittedly, we built a lot of it based off of what my mom put into hers. She was a planner. She's very organized. Her background is finance. So she kind of understood the money piece of it and just kind of how everything worked together.
She was the executor of my grandmother's estate, which was the onus of her creating this for me. So a lot of it was based on what she had, right? Because if she did all the research and the legwork and she understood what she was doing, she's done it before.
(32:45):
So that was a lot of the inspiration of what we put in there. We built on it a little bit just kind of based off of some different conversations we had with early customers and friends and family about things that needed to go in.
And then for the tech product, we'll be enhancing, you know, the baseline is the physical product and then based off of conversations and surveys that we've had with our customers so far, we'll begin adding additional features.
(33:15):
I said earlier, accounts and passwords. That was a big one. I didn't get a death certificate for my mom for five months. So during that time, having accounts and passwords for her mortgage and her car payments and utilities and all of that stuff, being able to get in there and do what I needed to do without.
(33:37):
I didn't have the death certificate. A lot of places would not. You couldn't do anything without it. It's like the magic ticket.
Seriously. And if it takes five months to get it, right? So I was able to go in and be sure her mortgage was getting paid, be sure her car was getting paid, utilities weren't going to get cut off and all of that stuff.
(34:00):
Not only that, but I knew where all of the assets were. I knew where her debt was. So, you know, as an executor, you have to have a good financial framework of the estate to do everything that you need to do to get the estate closed out, to pay off all of the debts.
So through having all of the accounts and passwords, I could actually see where all of that was and what was in there. But immediately just being able to pay for a mortgage gave me such peace of mind because where are they going to foreclose on the house?
(34:29):
I would have just had all of these worries and concerns that were just alleviated by having that stuff. Her will and medical power of attorney were in there. So we have a document section where you can store trust and living wills and any sort of legal documents that you have.
Yeah, you can store. The debt book is created for people to store exactly what it is that they need to store for their family. So everything from funeral wishes, walking you through that to, as Tripp said, passwords and accounts. Our tech platform has a progress bar to actually let you know, like this is what you have left to upload.
(35:03):
You can customize that at any time. We also have a contact book section that is a section that was not in his mom's book, but something we have added to ours because what we found was having family members or like her best friend to help spread the word that she had passed away.
So we don't have to do that. It was really helpful rallying people for her funeral and even down to being able to call her doctor and let him know that she had passed away was helpful with the coroner to understand, you know, is there something a little deeper based off her medical history?
(35:34):
Documents to store, like Tripp said, that includes anything and everything you want it to. It can be from legal documents down to if you want to upload your passport. And then the final section, items to be quick. So this was something that my mom and my aunt didn't talk for four years over an item in my grandmother's house.
And they're like the best of friends, like truly they are best friends. And so to know that they didn't talk for that long over an item is crazy. So you can actually upload pictures of items around the house and then you can assign who gets it and where that item is located.
(36:05):
Yeah.
From there, we're going to build, like I said earlier, leverage AI to build those legal documents in house so you don't have to go elsewhere to get them. We're going to do plug in to your browser so that it will automatically update your passwords as you update them.
We have some big ideas.
Big ideas for the future. Yeah.
Well, that is so great and something I'm so jealous of and you better believe I'll be getting one for myself. So I don't have to ever put that struggle and pain that I went through with my dad on anybody else. I could eliminate that as much as possible.
(36:41):
I want to do that.
Kendall's super proactive about that.
Calling about how to plan my funeral at 28.
I was, I was a little bit more privy as my dad was ill. I was his power of attorney. I was with him on his doctor's visit. I was his caregiver. So I am the oldest of three so I was pretty entrenched in what was going on. He didn't have, he was very young when he passed so like death wasn't something we were thinking about actively.
(37:09):
But, you know, when someone's really ill it is kind of something you're thinking about in the back of your head. But I was involved in all those conversations and I think all the time. If something had happened to me, how would my sister even pick up those pieces? How would my brother even jump in not knowing the things that I just had in my head?
And I think like if something in Rachel's family, if she just had to like jump in without any knowledge prior, how do you even get started in that? And so like what do you recommend as someone who might be like going in blind on this and struggling on like, okay, like how to balance all this? What do you even make of this? How do you even start?
(37:51):
Yeah, so I'm just playing off what you just said too. We actually had a customer come to us who had a dead book and his wife had a scare. They were really young, early 30s as well. And his wife had a scare where she had a blood clot and they didn't know if she was going to make it through the night. And he sent us a note and said, I'm so thankful I had the dead book.
And it was like no matter the outcome because either way, like I knew that I was taken care of and I could actually focus on my wife in that moment and not have to worry about like the what ifs or like where is this stuff? So he actually brought it to the hospital with him in case the doctors had questions.
(38:27):
And he literally was like, well, this is like where, you know, the living power attorney is or medical directive. So yeah, it goes for more than just death. But all of that to say, I would honestly, if you're young, I would get started with funeral wishes. That's something that you can verbally share with friends or family and just let them know, hey, like if I something ever happens to me at a young age, I want to be cremated or I want to have a traditional burial. I think that alone goes so far.
(38:54):
And then as you begin to gain assets and get really into your career, that's where I would start storing passwords and actually, you know, assigning assets to other people, having beneficiaries, making sure that people know they're beneficiary. That's kind of the trajectory I would go.
Contact book. I think if you if you're young and have a lot of people around you, then those people are naturally going to start spreading the word. But if you're older, I do think it helps for your children to know what is what is your best friend's phone number. I think that's something we found. Like we'd met his mom's best friend a bajillion times, but to actually have her phone number, we wouldn't have known how to contact her. So I think once you get older, providing that for your kids is really helpful.
(39:36):
Yeah. And Kendall, to your point, just having those key contacts, you know, if something, God forbid, were to happen to you during that process, your siblings could have picked up. Okay, this is these are dad's doctors. Like, I at least know how to get a hold of them and get up to speed on what's going on. Right. Having those key contacts is a great place to start as well for anyone, regardless of situation, I think.
(39:58):
That's great advice. So how do you hope having a product like the dead book can change the conversation around death and grief in our culture and society? Because I feel like it's still like such a taboo conversation and people are so scared. Like if you mention it, it's like you're going to die. It's like you can't talk about it. It's like, well, we're all gonna die at some point. So it is actually really difficult to die with nothing planned or like nothing set up.
(40:24):
So when we decided that we wanted to bring the dead books in the world, one of the first things Tripp and I talked about was we are so much more than a product. We have a product to help people and I'm so thankful that we do. But we want to be a brand that actually tackles the conversation head on.
We are a resource. We have content that helps people get more comfortable talking about death, that shares with them what to do, that walks them through the grief process, that really just is dead on about death and what it means as a society.
(40:57):
And through that, we've actually learned that, you know, there's a lot of societies out there outside of America that's very comfortable with death. We've learned so much about like how the European government handles death and read up on it. It's pretty incredible, but also just different religions and how comfortable they are with talking about death.
So we really hope as a brand to bring that into our personality. And if you're scared to talk about death, maybe just give us a follow and you don't have to respond. You can just listen until you get to a point where you're like, hey, you know, I have questions now or I feel comfortable going and having this conversation with a loved one now.
(41:33):
We really just hope to have people kind of watching and learning from us. Yeah. I mean, Rachel, to your point, it's going to happen to all of us. You know, we have a 100% mortality rate. No one's going to escape it.
And we really just truly hope that our product and through our kind of wider social mission, we can make death less taboo to talk about. We can bring it out of the shadows and make people more comfortable, A, talking about it and B, facing their own mortality so that they're more comfortable putting together a plan for their family and allowing their family the peace of mind of knowing that they have that plan.
(42:15):
Yeah, because I feel like death should be talked about differently anyway, even funerals, right? They're like so sad. Everyone's in all black. It's just like, it's already a sad thing, even just like the image of like walking down an aisle to go see somebody in coffin.
And it's the whole thing feels very sad and somber. They lived a whole life. It's already sad that they're gone, but I don't know. I don't even want to be displayed. To me, that's like, no, if I'm gone, put me away. Turn me a tree. I don't need people staring at me and feeling sad.
(42:51):
I personally don't want that after experiencing so much death and seeing so much. I feel like having more conversations, like maybe it'll also help people think like, maybe we don't want to do funerals this way. Just because it's done that way, maybe we don't need to keep doing it.
I agree 100% want, I want everyone to wear colors. I told Tripp I want it to be in an art gallery. I want there to be like a live band, people dancing, like cheers and cocktails, because that's who I am on this earth. So I want to be what people celebrate me as when I pass.
(43:23):
So I agree. I do think the conversation around funerals is, it's changing.
Yeah, it should be a celebration of life. My mom joked for my entire life almost that she wanted a Viking funeral. She wanted us to push her body out into the ocean and shoot flaming arrows at it and put a little keg on the beat and did not make the will, surprisingly. I was prepared.
(43:47):
I think it's illegal.
It's very illegal.
Well, you can drop off a coffin in like the middle of the ocean though, which I saw on a TikTok is like it's legal. It has to be far enough out where I guess it's like basically no man's land, but why would you just turn into ashes out of that?
Why would you pay for a coffin to just like litter the ocean? I don't know.
That's my thought, but I'd be worried like, am I still in there like alive? Like I don't even want to think about getting dropped in the ocean like that.
(44:15):
That's putting too many of my fears together. Yeah, it's like too many things at once. So yeah.
But apparently you can. I found that out on TikTok. So, you didn't know. Beach? No, no. Deep ocean? Okay.
Did you all have unexpected feedback or positive reviews from people when they were using the dead book that you weren't prepared to hear? Like feedback that you didn't know you were going to get because this is such, like y'all said, such a vulnerable time in people's lives.
(44:48):
We got a lot of feedback about the name. Not a lot. Some people don't like the name.
People don't like the name because I think they're scared to talk about death.
Yeah. And that's what it's called. And that's part of the mission is to kind of smack people in the face with it. So the name is the name.
You're more tied into this realm than I am. Yeah, I think we, it's been overwhelmingly positive feedback from day one and it's been something that's helped us continue to carry forward.
(45:15):
When you get the kind of feedback we've received, it really makes you feel like you're making a difference in the world and you can help people. And so you just want to keep going.
And surprisingly, when we did first launch, we launched a physical book and we thought, you know, the older generation wouldn't be comfortable with the tech platform.
And I think that is the most shocking feedback we've received. It was a lot of the 55 plus community actually saying they would like to see a tech version of this.
(45:39):
Wow. Yeah.
And I think there's a lot of people in the nursing profession, either general nursing or a lot of kind of palliative care, hospice nurses that just reach out and say, this is a fantastic idea.
I deal with this, you know, on a daily basis. And, you know, if people could just leverage a tool like this, I think it can make the process just so much easier on folks.
(46:03):
Yeah. And I would say that was shocking feedback too, because we had done our market research, as we said, we knew that there really wasn't a product like this out there other than like a few physical items out there.
And to me, I'm like, it is 2024. It's not like it's like some big creative idea. Like it's literally a storage platform for documents that loved ones will need.
(46:24):
So it was kind of shocking even hearing from like people within the profession, funeral directors, hospice nurses to be like, there's nothing like this on the market. You know, what do you mean?
Yeah.
Because people don't like saying the word dead. Like even when people pass away, they would say like, oh, I had someone pass away. They don't just say like they're dead. They're gone.
Like, they're dead, dead, dead, dead. Like no one wants to say that word. It's like people don't even like to say it.
(46:47):
And I think that's why also some people are like, if you talk about grief and they have an experience, they're like, oh, that's so negative. Like, don't bring that energy towards me.
It's like, is it negative when it literally happened to me? And like, I'm the one feeling the negative things. Like, you just have to hear about it. Like, what the hell? I think that's crazy.
You know, I always laugh about this too. Like as a society, we are so comfortable saying things like, oh my God, kill me now.
(47:10):
Or like laughing at a joke and being like, I am dead. That is so funny. But we can't actually say like, I'm going to die.
Yeah.
Talking about death. All right. Yeah. So it takes a little bit to break through and like actually talk about it and feel comfortable talking about it just because of the societal intricacies that we're talking about.
Like inevitably any conversation about death turns back to a conversation about life, right? It's okay. I am eventually going to die. What am I doing with my time here?
(47:40):
And how do I want to spend my time? And where do I want to put my energy on? What do I want my legacy to be?
And it turns into being kind of a beautiful conversation about life and legacy and not morose.
I'm going to die one day kind of conversation that everyone thinks it's going to be. So give it a try.
Hey.
(48:02):
What do you want people to walk away knowing about the dead book and any advice to people like when should you start thinking about this?
Like what are kind of some main takeaways you want people to walk away with to like know like I need to learn about the dead book?
When do I need to start thinking about this?
(48:24):
If you have kids, you own a house, if you're married, if you're dating or in a serious relationship, if you have someone else to worry about, you should begin thinking about this.
Hate to be that person that says it, but you just never know. My mom was healthy as an ox and she had just retired two years prior and had a physical two months before and she was healthy and she just died one day.
(48:51):
So unfortunately, we just never know when that's going to happen. So if you have someone you care about, it's time to start thinking about creating a plan for them. Should something happen to you?
I would also say that like if you're death curious and you just don't even know where to begin when it comes to planning or talking about death or even if you have a parent who is not open to sharing their plans with you,
(49:12):
follow us, come learn more about the dead book and we can we can help you through some of those conversations.
You can email us or DM us. If you ever have like specific questions and want content on that, we have a community now of everybody from like therapists to estate planning law firms to nurses that we can actually ask those questions to and bring you advice and content.
(49:34):
So again, you know, we want to be so much more than a product. We want to be a platform and an outlet for people who are just wanting to learn more.
And so that's one thing I would say about that book is just, you know, come ask your questions and we'll try to get them answered for you.
That's amazing because you really don't know. Like you said, your mom was healthy. Like my mom was an almond mom, like a health nut, like don't use a microwave, all this type of stuff.
(49:58):
And she got cancer and died. My mom did everything and she died. So I'm going to live my life. Let's think. I still try to eat healthy, but like I'm not going to overthink it because it can happen anyway.
So like, what is the point about stressing out about every little thing? If it could happen anyway, try to be healthy. You try to live a good life, but like, you don't know what kind of card you're dealt.
(50:20):
And even with my mom, when she was sick, she wanted me to be a power of attorney. And I was really stubborn about it because I was like, no, that means that you're going to die.
And I was like, so denial of that. And so I never filed the paper. I never completed it. And so we ended up having to go go appropriate and the thank you to my brother, like stepped up and took care of everything.
But I'm sure if I had just filed it, it would have been so much easier. But I was just like, I won't do this. Like I was just like, I can't.
(50:48):
And it's hard to take away the emotional piece of something like that, which is like, there's so much legal shit you have to deal with that it's like you just have to do it.
But it's really hard because like it signifies so much where I was like so avoidant of that. And then thankfully, I have a brother that like he handled everything.
(51:10):
He did the core. He did all the stuff. But I was just like, I don't want to do this. But it is really important to just do it because unfortunately, when someone dies, they don't just die.
It's like everything that's left behind explodes and you have to figure it out. And you just kind of have to do it even if you don't want to, which is like the hard part.
Yeah. And I mean, to your point, Rachel, like I said earlier, like he put this book together and went through all the trouble and research and process of actually piecing it all together and putting it in a central place and calling me and saying, hey, come to the house and going through it with me and telling me where it was.
(51:48):
But I just I was avoidant of I don't want to have this conversation because you have to address that my mother is mortal and this person that I hold so dear to me is one day not going to be here anymore.
Right. And I think she probably sensed that. And that's why there was a two page letter at the beginning telling me she probably told me I just didn't want to didn't want to hear it.
(52:12):
But yeah, I mean, it's it's something none of us ever want to think about, but it's necessary for sure.
Well, I love what y'all are doing and not just in the product form, but in the culture aspect of it, too, of trying to in some ways destigmatize conversations around death and estate planning and making sure that the the wills and what the people that we love actually want done happens.
(52:40):
I wish I wish I had met y'all sooner and earlier in life because man, y'all would have helped me a ton.
Kendall, we'll get you some dead bugs just say or you're allowed to.
I'm making one for myself.
Now, yeah, yeah.
But for other people also listening who have found themselves in very similar situations, how can people find you? How can they connect with you? How can they stay up to date with you? If you'll have any announcements coming out that you want to share, like, let's get you plugged with our listeners so they can learn more and tap into these resources.
(53:15):
Yeah, so we are dead book.co on Tiktok and Instagram. You also have a blue sky, but admittedly, I'm a little scared of blue sky, but I'm blue sky. If you want to follow us, I didn't even know we had one.
We're also on LinkedIn as dead book and you know we share a lot of fun business updates on LinkedIn that you don't necessarily see on Instagram or Tiktok. The big news is that we are a tech company now and that is going to allow us pivot very quickly and you know, take your feedback and make product enhancements really quickly just based on feedback.
(53:48):
So again, if you ever have any ideas for dead book.
Email us hello at the dead book.co and that's our website as well the dead book.co and we are open to all suggestions and feedback.
Amazing. Thank you all so much. Thank you so much for coming on.
Of course we really appreciate it. And we're just so grateful to be a part of this community truly. Yeah. Thank you.
(54:12):
The community has been actually really amazing. Yeah, realize we've been Griever's for a while, but we haven't entered. I feel like the grief community till last year and we're like, oh, we should have been talking about this and dealing with it a lot sooner.
Yeah, like a small little bubble, but when you find it amazing. Yeah, super supportive. And I just I'm very thankful to have found this community and be able to be a part of it. And thank you guys for the work that you're doing within it.
(54:39):
Thank you. And I think this product will definitely help a ton of our listeners and already helped so many of your own. So it very excited to hear about new things coming out with you all.
Yeah, when I heard about it, I was like, okay, Kendall would definitely find this useful because you know, yeah, Kendall, even like she'll talk to me like, oh, I called this person I called that I'm like, you're really thinking about that.
And it's because she had handled all that. She's very proactive of like, I want my siblings to be prepared for everything like very much the older sister that's like trying to take care of them and like make everything super easy for them.
(55:11):
So I was like, I know Kendall will love this product because she had to go through it all on her own, for the most part, and she's very proactive about making sure that everyone else will be prepared or be taken care of.
She's not leaving anytime soon, but just be prepared.
She will be prepared.
(55:32):
It's better to be prepared.
It's true. So Kendall will be your number one fan.
We'll get you a t-shirt.
So we're following you along. Hopefully, TikTok will still be a thing. Hopefully, there'll be a Hail Mary. I feel like that is like the best growing community. So hopefully that exists still when this comes out. It'll be on the 21st. We'll know by the time this comes out if TikTok is still a thing.
(55:58):
We'll see.
But yeah, follow them on their platforms. I've been watching all their videos and learning about the product and this was such a great conversation. So thank you again for joining us.
Appreciate it. Bye, everyone.
Do you know how hard it is to die?
(00:02):
Are you overwhelmed with managing a loved one's affairs
after they're gone?
Do you even know where to start?
You're not alone, but finally,
someone is doing something about it.
In this episode, founders of the Deadbook, Brittany and Tripp,
dive into their journey,
innovating the future of estate planning.
Let's talk about getting your life and legacy in order.
Welcome, welcome.
(00:39):
We have Jessica and Tripp here,
which are the founders of the Deadbook.
We actually had posted a video with Kendall
talking about death certificates and its importance last year,
and it actually did really well.
And it made us think that a lot of people don't know
how much logistical things happen with grief,
(01:00):
but this is another whole part that often gets overlooked.
So when we saw what you guys were building,
we thought it was really cool and really useful.
So you're the first product we featured
on our podcast so far,
but we thought it was a really important product
to show people and to learn more about
because it is a really hard piece of grief and death
(01:23):
that doesn't get enough.
I feel like, and the limelight is the right word,
but just like enough shine for how important it is
and how much it affects the process.
So we're so happy to have you both here today.
Thank you for having us.
We're very passionate about this
and truly feel like we can change the conversation around,
not just death, but how you plan for it
(01:44):
and what you do when you're grieving
and how to administer an estate.
Yeah, thank you all for having us on.
We're excited to be here.
Yeah, so we can start off with, obviously,
we're talking about death and passing and loss.
And so, Tripp, you're the one who lost somebody
that led to this.
So do you mind telling us about the person you lost
and a little bit about your mother?
(02:05):
Something sweet, something that kind of brings her to life
for our listeners.
Yeah, my mother's name was Susan,
and man, she was just a force of life.
She was one of those just bright and happy people
that you just wanted to be around all the time.
She never met a stranger.
(02:25):
She could strike up a conversation with anyone.
And on top of all of that,
she was just the absolute best mom you could ever ask for.
She always knew just the right thing to say
and just the right moment.
You know, when I broke up with my middle school girlfriend
and thought the world was crashing around,
she always had that phlegm piece of advice
(02:46):
and that just continued throughout my whole life.
But she really, really was just this bright
and amazing person that's really increasingly rare
in the world.
And I just, I feel very honored to have her,
have had her as my mom and in my life.
(03:07):
Aw, thank you so much for sharing.
She sounds like a really lovely person.
The people we lose are so important to kind of how
we navigate our lives forward after they're passing.
So just a little moment to remember her
and obviously the legacy that she leaves behind.
Yeah, I mean, she left a huge legacy behind.
She always cared about people.
She always volunteered her time
(03:28):
and we're hoping to carry that legacy on.
I feel like grief can be channeled
into creating beautiful things for people in their honor.
Let's not talk about enough, like the aftermath
and just grief in general.
So anything that's changing the conversation is always
a positive.
So since this is a grief podcast, do you mind sharing,
(03:49):
I feel like the start of your grief experience,
you don't have to share like the details
of everything that happened,
but how has losing your mom shaped your grief?
Yeah, so the day, so I found her actually dead
in her kitchen and it just kind of ripped away my foundational
(04:11):
understanding of the world really.
You know, it just kind of tears apart that fabric
of what you think you understand
and just everything kind of ceases to make sense.
And, you know, for probably a few days afterwards,
I was borderline not comatose, but catatonic, I guess.
(04:33):
He was pretty much in a coma.
I've never cried like that in my life
and I hope I never do again.
And, you know, from there, it was just a lot
of kind of picking up the pieces
and just slowly kind of putting the pieces back together
and getting back up on my feet and kind of,
(04:54):
I said before on another podcast that we did,
just kind of that month or so after was kind of
like in a war movie where it's hazy and there's explosions
and the person's just kind of disoriented.
That's kind of what it was like for probably a few months,
was just kind of reorienting myself
and then trying to make sense of the world without my mother
(05:18):
who was an amazing person, was an amazing parent,
and was always my rock and helped me make sense
of things and situations that I didn't understand,
like just trying to figure out how to move forward
without that person that was such a huge part of your life.
Me and Kendall talk a lot about these images
that flash in your head,
(05:39):
and whether it's when they're passed away
or when they're really sick.
And it's like you wish you didn't have to see those anymore.
Like you could be just like sitting down on a random day
and that image will flash through your brain.
And it's really hard,
and people don't talk about that part enough,
it's like it is really hard to have those images in your head.
And they don't just go away.
(06:00):
Like they repeat and they flow through your brain
at a random time.
I can imagine that was a really hard experience.
Yeah, it was.
And you know, it still happens.
And you just, you got to kind of work with it when it happens, right?
Cry, whatever you need.
Yeah, so you know, I still have to go get a good cry in every now and then.
Yeah.
(06:21):
I'm a pro-crier at this point.
I don't know that I'm a pro yet, but I'm getting old.
Okay.
So Jessica, being married to Tripp
and him going through like this catatonic state of grief,
how was your role in all of this and supporting him,
managing things like at home and then work,
(06:42):
and then also learning that you're also really close with his mom?
This is your own grief as well that you're now dealing with.
So it's kind of like compounded in a way.
Yeah, I would say that my grief journey couldn't have been more different than Tripp's.
But I mean, that's normal.
Like we're not meant to have the same grief journey.
Nobody does and nobody will.
But for me, being so young, I mean, I was 31 when we lost her.
(07:07):
And I'm still just trying to figure out life.
So to have to go through this at such a young age,
that was really, really hard because nobody had ever been through it.
I had nobody to turn to.
I didn't know who I could go to for support to say,
how do you show up for your husband?
And I just kind of had to figure it out.
And no matter how much he explained to me what he was feeling,
(07:28):
because he's very good at that, like communicating,
I still couldn't feel the same thing.
And so for me, my grief very much looks like a busy body.
I was trying to, I don't want to say I was trying to forget what happened
because I very much wanted to keep her present.
But he couldn't get out of bed.
(07:49):
And I still had to walk the dog and make sure that, you know,
we were drinking water and eating meals when we could.
And just doing your daily routine gave me a sense of normalcy almost.
But I jumped back into that so fast because for me,
I felt like that's how I could best support him,
let him have the space and time he needed to grieve the loss of his mom.
(08:12):
And showing up for me was doing these household things.
But I do preface that by saying later on,
I did realize I never really gave myself the chance to grieve.
I cried in the shower one of those, nobody knows if I'm crying or not.
Is it water? Is it tears? I don't know.
And I kind of took that as, okay, well, you know, I had my chance to grieve.
(08:34):
Now I've got to like make sure that the house is moving forward.
And in reality, like I just never had the space to grieve her loss
the way I would have liked to.
But that's something that I will take going forward with me is like,
next time something like this happens, because it's going to happen to everybody,
I need to give myself grace too.
Like it's okay if the dishes pile up.
(08:56):
It's okay if the dog doesn't get a big walk every single day.
There needs to be space for everybody who's affected by the death of somebody.
Yeah. And I'll give Jessica a lot of credit.
She was my rock going through all of this.
And she made sure that things got done and I did what I needed to do.
And she basically looked at me one day and said,
you're not going to get through this by yourself.
(09:18):
I'm going to find you a therapist.
And she found me a great therapist to go see.
And that helped me tremendously.
But she immediately just put me on her back and just helped me get through it.
And I can't thank her enough, even though it was probably a little bit to her detriment
because she didn't get time to grieve until later,
but she just automatically clicked into,
I'm going to be your rock and get you through this mode.
(09:41):
It was pretty amazing.
Thanks, Shep.
You're welcome.
I will say, bringing up a therapist, like one thing I will say is,
if you are a spouse or a partner, even a child who has a grieving parent,
you're not meant to help them through their grief by themselves.
That's just not the reality.
I'm not equipped to professionally help somebody through grief,
(10:03):
and neither is anyone else out there unless you are a trained therapist to do so.
So going to see a therapist is more than okay and it's more than normal.
And if you have the means and ability to find a therapist, go.
Ditto.
Yeah.
We hear stories of grief where it pulls people apart or it puts a big toll on relationships.
(10:24):
I see so often in grief support groups where it's like, oh, someone died,
my partner isn't supportive, they don't get it,
they think that you should just be happy again and quote unquote.
And everything should go back to normal.
And I think that is a whole other discussion, but it's really hard.
Because it's not the same grief, right?
Like you said, you don't know exactly what he's going through.
He doesn't know exactly what you're going through.
(10:46):
And at the same time, you're just sad, right?
You're just trying to move forward and function.
So it's really a difficult, tricky situation that I think people don't take the time to like
dissect all the little pieces of it and how intricate it can be
and why so many people fall apart during this time
and why so many relationships, friendships end because of grief.
So it's good to hear a positive story about it and a good outcome.
(11:10):
Yeah.
Same.
I read on your website, your mom left essentially a dead book, right?
She had like a bunch of her documents together.
Is that correct?
So, well, one, that's amazing that she had the foresight to do that.
I think a lot of people avoid thinking about that.
But how did you handle even with that, right?
(11:35):
That's a lot more than people have to start with.
But how did you both handle with like the emotional and mental load of managing your mom's estate
on top of just grieving?
Because the grief process is hard, but then you have to like close bank accounts
and empty their house out, sell cars.
Like there's so many things that come along when someone passes away.
Like how was that handling both for you?
(11:56):
It's something that I worked with my therapist on and she set expectations up front
because I told her, you know, obviously everything has sentimental value,
whether it's a car or a pair of socks or like a chair in her house,
anything, her Sky Miles account, right?
So I talked with her early on and she gave me a really good piece of advice,
which is there's no time on this.
(12:20):
So take it at your own pace and, you know, do 25% of what you're feeling up for
and then do 50% of what you're feeling up for and kind of work your way up
and just kind of tackle the things in pieces.
No one likes the administrative back end.
It's opaque and it's cumbersome and it's antiquated.
(12:41):
And most of the people you talk to really don't do it that often
and not for want of trying,
but they can be unhelpful just because they don't do it that often.
And it can just be a frustrating experience going through the administrative process
while you're also trying to grieve because it can be a frustrating process.
(13:06):
Your emotions are already raw and just kind of picks at that open wound,
if you want to call it that, because it's aggravating and it's slow
and you feel like you're not making any progress.
But I just tried to take it one step at a time and treat it as more of a marathon
than just kind of a sprint to get everything done
and just did it at a pace that felt comfortable for me.
(13:29):
Yeah, I think I could add two things to that.
I think the job situation as a whole, I could talk about that for a really long time,
but having to administer in a state, it's a nine to five on top of your nine to five.
I mean, it literally takes every single weekend for months and months on end.
And Tripp's company treated him so well and gave him about three months off.
(13:55):
And I think having that space allowed him to do a lot of the administrative stuff.
And I think that's something that he felt when he felt ready,
because it's not like he had to come home from his corporate job and do it all.
He kind of had the space to do it.
And I would say the other thing is people want to support you and they want to rally around you.
And for anybody who's been through the state administration process,
(14:17):
you probably know that if you're the executor,
companies and corporations won't talk to anybody else but the executor.
And with Susan's debt book, I was able to help Tripp with the things that he gave me permission to help him with.
So little things like changing the credit card on the phone bill or, you know, the Sky Miles account, like calling Delta.
Even though they wouldn't talk to me because I had her passwords,
(14:39):
I could get in and do some of these tasks and allow him to have the space he needed to grieve or be in bed.
But also, even when it came to cleaning out the house,
her siblings wanted to come down and make it a like, have a glass of whiskey because she loved whiskey and help us pat.
You know, lean on people.
Obviously, like give them your permission before they administer something in a state if you're the executor of it.
(15:05):
But like people, people want to help you.
I love that. I wish someone told me that when I was going through a bulk of my father's administrative estate stuff.
It was same thing. It would keep me up at night.
I was trying to get it done really quickly because that's what everybody told me to do.
And then on top of that, not knowing how to do it, though, like I didn't have a guidebook.
(15:26):
I'm like, here's what you do next.
Or here's how you have to do this in order. The people you got to talk to.
So would you say that like this experience that y'all were going through led to inspiring the dead book
and how this idea and this concept could help other people?
So my mom had her binder and she called it her dead book because she had a sense of humor.
(15:50):
That was just who she was.
So she called it her dead book. It's probably a day or two after maybe three when I finally get out of bed and come downstairs.
You know, the day we found her, I asked Jessica to go into my mom's house.
I go upstairs to her office, go to the store, get this binder out.
And so we cracked it open and a lot like you kind of like no idea where to start, no idea what to do, who to contact, any of that.
(16:18):
And cracked it open and flipped through it. And I kind of knew what was in it because we'd been through it, my mom and I, years prior.
And it's one of those things where I kind of.
You don't want to think about it.
Yeah, you don't want to think about it. We're going through it.
And I was just kind of begrudgingly listening because I was like, all right, you got another 40 years.
(16:41):
I don't want to think about you dying. So I didn't really pay attention. Sorry, mom.
But, you know, I cracked this thing open and first thing was like a two page letter from her of.
This is what's in here. This is what you need to do with it.
These are the first things and just kind of waited a while.
I just took a deep breath and it's like, OK, like, even though she's not here, she's got me through this. Right.
(17:02):
She's so it gave me a lot of peace of mind.
It helped us tremendously through the process of just understanding what to expect.
And not only that, but having the documents and everything that I needed and all of that in front of me.
So, you know, through the course of doing all of this, had some family members and some of my mom's friends that knew she had the book, but didn't know what was in the book.
(17:28):
And they reached out and said, hey, like, I understand your mom had this book.
Can you tell me what was in it or can I see it?
Because I kind of need to get my stuff together.
Well, after probably the, I don't know, fifth or sixth one of those conversations, Jessica and I kind of sitting on our kitchen island one night and she goes,
(17:50):
this could actually help a lot of people, I think.
So we kind of started sniffing around and doing some market research and decided that, yeah, actually, this could probably help a lot of people.
Yeah, it was actually shocking when we were doing our market research.
There's really nothing out there.
I mean, there are some things, but overall, there's not a lot of resources, not a lot of information, not even products that help people through the administration part.
(18:16):
And the tools we did find were usually like government tools, which that's confusing and they're outdated.
And they were hard to understand from somebody who's just trying to grieve, you know, to like have legal language is not ideal.
Well, and hearing your story, sounds like your mother was already thinking ahead and thinking that she didn't want to impart the grief that you were already going to have to experience emotionally.
(18:42):
But then the grief and pain of having to figure out all the paperwork and trying to find this important paper that God knows where that is.
And at least she had the forethought.
I think to my situation with my dad where his loss, his passing was very sudden, we didn't have any of this stuff set up.
(19:03):
We had a few things, like if something were to happen in case of emergencies, I was I knew where to go.
But other than that, it was like starting at ground zero with nothing and no passwords to anything, not even knowing what accounts were attached to his credit card.
Like it was just like lifting up every single rock and not knowing what I was going to find.
(19:25):
And I think for myself, if I had this product, it would have saved me so many nights of just tears and frustration, trying to dig through piles of papers and figure out, OK, what do I got to do next?
Like, who do I need to call? How do I get this all organized and situated?
Yeah. And I mean, no one should be crying a night and be frustrated when they're already grieving the loss of a loved one.
(19:49):
Right. I mean, it just the process itself should not be as difficult as it is.
And that's a conversation for another time in another podcast.
I mean, that's just it's it's not fair to the family of the loved ones to have people crying at night, frustrated, trying to get through this process that they don't even want to be doing in the first place.
Yeah. I think to your comment, Jessica, of like people wanting to help and my family was super supportive and they wanted to know how to help.
(20:16):
I didn't even know how to have them help. I didn't even know where to guide them or I didn't even know how to ask for that or where to begin.
And I think even just with something simple as like a letter of like, here's how you do this in order.
Here's like maybe where to start. I would have had much more confidence reaching out to my younger sister and being like, OK, you could take on this task because I have to worry about these bigger balls.
(20:41):
You can handle this. My brother can handle that and kind of split up the responsibility of all of it rather than me feeling like the burden of all that was on my shoulders.
And like I had to be so responsible for it. Absolutely. I mean, I think it's hard to ask people for help.
This is one of the hardest things to do, especially when you're in like a very vulnerable state as to say like, hey, I'm raising my hand. I need help.
(21:03):
That's a really tough thing to do. But, you know, one thing I would encourage, just like you just said, Kendall, when it comes to like planning a funeral or if they had assigned like certain items in the household can go to like family members or loved ones or best friends or whoever it be.
Those are little things that people can help with. It's getting the flowers for the funeral or, you know, taking that ring that your sibling gets and getting it to her.
(21:30):
Yeah, I love that. That's great advice.
I'm so sorry that you went through that and carried that burden. I know that was heavy and tough.
Well, in this case, hearing about in very similar situations that y'all have created a product that hopefully reduces that anguish for somebody else in the future.
(21:51):
If you don't think you need it, I swear someone in your family will need it eventually because that's what I started thinking about. I called in an estate planner person around 28 and was like, hey, I think I need some documents just to like get stuff in order and just in case something happened to me.
And they're like, aren't you a little young to be thinking about dying? And I was like, I know, but like my dad passed away a few years ago and I know what it's like to not have this stuff.
(22:15):
So I don't want to do the same if something happened out of the blue to put that on my brother and sister because I know how much it sucked.
Yeah, not to be a Debbie Downer either. I learned this through like the estate administration process and just through starting the dead bug.
But technically, once you turn 18, you need your own will.
Wow. So there's I cannot remember the name. I wish I could. But there's a estate planning lawyer couple on TikTok and they talk about that all the time. Just trying to your generation.
(22:44):
Yeah, it's kind of an issue. And like a lot of my girlfriends are starting to have families who are young 30s.
And, you know, that's when I think a lot of people say, oh, OK, now I brought like life into this world. I need to do something to protect that.
And also, like you've been through this with your father. You're reaching out to a professional for help. And they're just like, oh, you're too young.
(23:05):
Well, I can start tomorrow. Like what? Well, anyway, I started to touch on.
Well, that's got a good segue into our next question. So for everyone listening, what exactly is the dead book and how does help people manage the overwhelming administrative tasks that follow a death?
Sure. So we are a central repository for all of the information and documents needed to administer an estate.
(23:31):
We have historically been a physical product, but in a few days, we will be launching our tech platform.
Congratulations. Thank you.
Based on user feedback, we're launching a tech platform.
So basically, with the tech platform, we're going to be able to build on the resources and we want to provide a lot of educational resources.
(23:52):
Right. So not only will the user be able to go in and store all of the information, like accounts and passwords, assets and liabilities, funeral wishes, items to leave behind,
documents, storage and all of that stuff will eventually bring the legal document creation in house.
So it's kind of a one stop shop for everything you need estate related, but at an affordable price and using approachable language and resources so that the person can also leverage those resources along the way and along their planning journey.
(24:25):
Research shows that a lot of people never make any sort of estate plan because they don't know where to start. It's intimidating. So we're trying to provide as many resources as possible to make the topic more approachable so that people can build this plan for their family and provide peace of mind once they are no longer here.
I think where our niche really is going to go though is having been through the grieving and estate administration piece where we hope to take dead book is more so for the back end, the resources for the back end really giving you a checklist on based off this person's dead book.
(25:00):
Here's exactly what you need to do in the first 48 hours, first week, first month, first three months.
And you'll see when we launch our tech platform that every single user can add to viewers to their dead book. And the critical information like passwords is completely locked down until they can prove that that person is incapacitated or has passed away.
(25:21):
But it allows us to really have that personal connection with those who are who are grieving the loss of somebody and actually walking them hand in hand through the state administration process.
Yeah, we don't want to be an online vault for information and documents. We also want to make this topic more approachable and we want to guide people through both the front end and you know also the back end as well.
(25:45):
This is so incredible and I think leads to what I'm thinking back when I was like in the midst of it and in the thick of grieving and in the thick of just like crying randomly at all the times was how inextricably intertwined the administrative part is with grief.
I remember thinking just getting mail with my dad's name on it. Instant tears like instantly. And I would be like, I thought I told you, I called you on told you that he died, I had to send you like a death certificate for some reason and then seeing like a piece of mail with his name on it would just be like a shot to the heart.
(26:21):
I know that feeling. I know that feeling well.
Yeah, or like the like phone calls you might get and they're like, Hi, I'm trying to reach so and so and you're like, Oh, well, he's been dead for a few months now. Like, good luck trying to find him try to find humor in the whole situation.
But yeah, it really sucks when it's like you're trying to figure out how to live your life now.
(26:43):
You're trying to compartmentalize your grief where you can and then all of a sudden you get a phone call or piece of mail that is linked to all this administrative work. It's just like it starts all over again. It's just a cycle of, of like, Oh, man, I just ripped open the wound and now have to deal with this again.
Yeah, that was, you're bringing it back up. I'm feeling it in my right now. Yeah, that was that was super tough. I got a lot of calls, people trying to buy my mom's house. I don't want to have this conversation or they're looking for her to just, I, I empathize with that. I know that feeling entirely too well.
(27:19):
Well, it's sad that we, we can relate on this. And unfortunately, a lot of people that are finding our podcasts are people in that window of intense grief right after a loss and just trying to find some sort of resource or support that can help them understand all of this and what they're going through.
(27:41):
And I'm sure you can relate that, like in that immediate moment of grief, you like, you don't know where your mind is at. Your brain is hazy. Like, good luck trying to make decisions on things.
You're so caught up with, Oh my God, I just lost someone super important to me. So do you have advice or insights to share with listeners, maybe in that very specific window of time on how they could prepare for this reality or what they could be doing to approach all of this that they might be having to take on?
(28:16):
Yes, I would. So here's a, here's a proactive piece of advice is have this conversation with your family members so that they have a plan in the immediate aftermath in that window of intense grief.
You know, immediately you kind of have to, you're faced with funeral plans and that's kind of something you immediately have to do.
(28:44):
They are a business and like the wedding industry, they will take advantage of your emotions. So go into that conversation with that framing, I guess, going into that conversation.
But as far as being in kind of the immediate throes of grief, it's gonna suck.
(29:07):
It doesn't really matter how you dice it and how you approach it.
You're going to feel weird ways that really you have no explanation for. You're going to be angry for no reason. You're going to be sad, you're going to be tired.
Some of those things are going to come together. Some are going to come individually. They'll mix and match and do whatever they want to do.
(29:29):
And sometimes it'll be intense and sometimes they won't. But it is going to be a weird time. It's going to suck.
And you need to give yourself grace to get through it.
If you're feeling angry and it's inexplicable, it is the grief. If you go outside and go for a walk, you know, just do whatever you need to do to get through it.
(29:54):
Because grief does weird things. You know, you hear about the five stages of grief and it's not true.
Sometimes they all come at once and it's going to be a weird time. Lean on your friends and loved ones and let people help you and just really focus on the love that's surrounding you to get through it.
(30:15):
Yeah. And I think to feel the emotions as much as you need to. Don't try to suffocate them. Don't try to push them down.
And going off of that, you don't have to show up for events. You're allowed to say no. You're allowed to take the time you need. If it's six months, it's six months. If it's six years, it's six years.
Like you're allowed to say no to events and happenings. Be honest with your boss at work. Like, hey, I'm having a really bad day and I just need a little more time on this project.
(30:48):
And also, just honestly, trim the fat. You're going to find through grief that there's a lot of people who will not show up for you, that you expected to show up for you.
It's okay to let them drop out of your life. And it actually helps you move forward because it opens the door for more people to come into your life and help you through it.
Yeah. People are not going to come through that you expect to and people you totally don't expect to or absolutely go into. And I experienced that. I don't know if you did or not, Kendall.
(31:20):
But another thing is as a society, we like to put some sort of finite timeframe on grief. Like, okay, it's been three months. You're cool now, right? Everything's fine.
There's no finish line really with grief. It's just something that's always going to be there and you learn to live with and it becomes part of your life as does the memory of the person you lost.
(31:43):
But it's false expectations to enter this process with. If I can just make it six months, it's all going to be better, I guess. It's going to be there.
It's going to be a marathon and just prepare yourself for that and lean on your loved ones.
Talking about the Deadbook, like what goes into it, how did you both decide what would actually be included in the Deadbook and what are some key features that you want to highlight?
(32:15):
Admittedly, we built a lot of it based off of what my mom put into hers. She was a planner. She's very organized. Her background is finance. So she kind of understood the money piece of it and just kind of how everything worked together.
She was the executor of my grandmother's estate, which was the onus of her creating this for me. So a lot of it was based on what she had, right? Because if she did all the research and the legwork and she understood what she was doing, she's done it before.
(32:45):
So that was a lot of the inspiration of what we put in there. We built on it a little bit just kind of based off of some different conversations we had with early customers and friends and family about things that needed to go in.
And then for the tech product, we'll be enhancing, you know, the baseline is the physical product and then based off of conversations and surveys that we've had with our customers so far, we'll begin adding additional features.
(33:15):
I said earlier, accounts and passwords. That was a big one. I didn't get a death certificate for my mom for five months. So during that time, having accounts and passwords for her mortgage and her car payments and utilities and all of that stuff, being able to get in there and do what I needed to do without.
(33:37):
I didn't have the death certificate. A lot of places would not. You couldn't do anything without it. It's like the magic ticket.
Seriously. And if it takes five months to get it, right? So I was able to go in and be sure her mortgage was getting paid, be sure her car was getting paid, utilities weren't going to get cut off and all of that stuff.
(34:00):
Not only that, but I knew where all of the assets were. I knew where her debt was. So, you know, as an executor, you have to have a good financial framework of the estate to do everything that you need to do to get the estate closed out, to pay off all of the debts.
So through having all of the accounts and passwords, I could actually see where all of that was and what was in there. But immediately just being able to pay for a mortgage gave me such peace of mind because where are they going to foreclose on the house?
(34:29):
I would have just had all of these worries and concerns that were just alleviated by having that stuff. Her will and medical power of attorney were in there. So we have a document section where you can store trust and living wills and any sort of legal documents that you have.
Yeah, you can store. The debt book is created for people to store exactly what it is that they need to store for their family. So everything from funeral wishes, walking you through that to, as Tripp said, passwords and accounts. Our tech platform has a progress bar to actually let you know, like this is what you have left to upload.
(35:03):
You can customize that at any time. We also have a contact book section that is a section that was not in his mom's book, but something we have added to ours because what we found was having family members or like her best friend to help spread the word that she had passed away.
So we don't have to do that. It was really helpful rallying people for her funeral and even down to being able to call her doctor and let him know that she had passed away was helpful with the coroner to understand, you know, is there something a little deeper based off her medical history?
(35:34):
Documents to store, like Tripp said, that includes anything and everything you want it to. It can be from legal documents down to if you want to upload your passport. And then the final section, items to be quick. So this was something that my mom and my aunt didn't talk for four years over an item in my grandmother's house.
And they're like the best of friends, like truly they are best friends. And so to know that they didn't talk for that long over an item is crazy. So you can actually upload pictures of items around the house and then you can assign who gets it and where that item is located.
(36:05):
Yeah.
From there, we're going to build, like I said earlier, leverage AI to build those legal documents in house so you don't have to go elsewhere to get them. We're going to do plug in to your browser so that it will automatically update your passwords as you update them.
We have some big ideas.
Big ideas for the future. Yeah.
Well, that is so great and something I'm so jealous of and you better believe I'll be getting one for myself. So I don't have to ever put that struggle and pain that I went through with my dad on anybody else. I could eliminate that as much as possible.
(36:41):
I want to do that.
Kendall's super proactive about that.
Calling about how to plan my funeral at 28.
I was, I was a little bit more privy as my dad was ill. I was his power of attorney. I was with him on his doctor's visit. I was his caregiver. So I am the oldest of three so I was pretty entrenched in what was going on. He didn't have, he was very young when he passed so like death wasn't something we were thinking about actively.
(37:09):
But, you know, when someone's really ill it is kind of something you're thinking about in the back of your head. But I was involved in all those conversations and I think all the time. If something had happened to me, how would my sister even pick up those pieces? How would my brother even jump in not knowing the things that I just had in my head?
And I think like if something in Rachel's family, if she just had to like jump in without any knowledge prior, how do you even get started in that? And so like what do you recommend as someone who might be like going in blind on this and struggling on like, okay, like how to balance all this? What do you even make of this? How do you even start?
(37:51):
Yeah, so I'm just playing off what you just said too. We actually had a customer come to us who had a dead book and his wife had a scare. They were really young, early 30s as well. And his wife had a scare where she had a blood clot and they didn't know if she was going to make it through the night. And he sent us a note and said, I'm so thankful I had the dead book.
And it was like no matter the outcome because either way, like I knew that I was taken care of and I could actually focus on my wife in that moment and not have to worry about like the what ifs or like where is this stuff? So he actually brought it to the hospital with him in case the doctors had questions.
(38:27):
And he literally was like, well, this is like where, you know, the living power attorney is or medical directive. So yeah, it goes for more than just death. But all of that to say, I would honestly, if you're young, I would get started with funeral wishes. That's something that you can verbally share with friends or family and just let them know, hey, like if I something ever happens to me at a young age, I want to be cremated or I want to have a traditional burial. I think that alone goes so far.
(38:54):
And then as you begin to gain assets and get really into your career, that's where I would start storing passwords and actually, you know, assigning assets to other people, having beneficiaries, making sure that people know they're beneficiary. That's kind of the trajectory I would go.
Contact book. I think if you if you're young and have a lot of people around you, then those people are naturally going to start spreading the word. But if you're older, I do think it helps for your children to know what is what is your best friend's phone number. I think that's something we found. Like we'd met his mom's best friend a bajillion times, but to actually have her phone number, we wouldn't have known how to contact her. So I think once you get older, providing that for your kids is really helpful.
(39:36):
Yeah. And Kendall, to your point, just having those key contacts, you know, if something, God forbid, were to happen to you during that process, your siblings could have picked up. Okay, this is these are dad's doctors. Like, I at least know how to get a hold of them and get up to speed on what's going on. Right. Having those key contacts is a great place to start as well for anyone, regardless of situation, I think.
(39:58):
That's great advice. So how do you hope having a product like the dead book can change the conversation around death and grief in our culture and society? Because I feel like it's still like such a taboo conversation and people are so scared. Like if you mention it, it's like you're going to die. It's like you can't talk about it. It's like, well, we're all gonna die at some point. So it is actually really difficult to die with nothing planned or like nothing set up.
(40:24):
So when we decided that we wanted to bring the dead books in the world, one of the first things Tripp and I talked about was we are so much more than a product. We have a product to help people and I'm so thankful that we do. But we want to be a brand that actually tackles the conversation head on.
We are a resource. We have content that helps people get more comfortable talking about death, that shares with them what to do, that walks them through the grief process, that really just is dead on about death and what it means as a society.
(40:57):
And through that, we've actually learned that, you know, there's a lot of societies out there outside of America that's very comfortable with death. We've learned so much about like how the European government handles death and read up on it. It's pretty incredible, but also just different religions and how comfortable they are with talking about death.
So we really hope as a brand to bring that into our personality. And if you're scared to talk about death, maybe just give us a follow and you don't have to respond. You can just listen until you get to a point where you're like, hey, you know, I have questions now or I feel comfortable going and having this conversation with a loved one now.
(41:33):
We really just hope to have people kind of watching and learning from us. Yeah. I mean, Rachel, to your point, it's going to happen to all of us. You know, we have a 100% mortality rate. No one's going to escape it.
And we really just truly hope that our product and through our kind of wider social mission, we can make death less taboo to talk about. We can bring it out of the shadows and make people more comfortable, A, talking about it and B, facing their own mortality so that they're more comfortable putting together a plan for their family and allowing their family the peace of mind of knowing that they have that plan.
(42:15):
Yeah, because I feel like death should be talked about differently anyway, even funerals, right? They're like so sad. Everyone's in all black. It's just like, it's already a sad thing, even just like the image of like walking down an aisle to go see somebody in coffin.
And it's the whole thing feels very sad and somber. They lived a whole life. It's already sad that they're gone, but I don't know. I don't even want to be displayed. To me, that's like, no, if I'm gone, put me away. Turn me a tree. I don't need people staring at me and feeling sad.
(42:51):
I personally don't want that after experiencing so much death and seeing so much. I feel like having more conversations, like maybe it'll also help people think like, maybe we don't want to do funerals this way. Just because it's done that way, maybe we don't need to keep doing it.
I agree 100% want, I want everyone to wear colors. I told Tripp I want it to be in an art gallery. I want there to be like a live band, people dancing, like cheers and cocktails, because that's who I am on this earth. So I want to be what people celebrate me as when I pass.
(43:23):
So I agree. I do think the conversation around funerals is, it's changing.
Yeah, it should be a celebration of life. My mom joked for my entire life almost that she wanted a Viking funeral. She wanted us to push her body out into the ocean and shoot flaming arrows at it and put a little keg on the beat and did not make the will, surprisingly. I was prepared.
(43:47):
I think it's illegal.
It's very illegal.
Well, you can drop off a coffin in like the middle of the ocean though, which I saw on a TikTok is like it's legal. It has to be far enough out where I guess it's like basically no man's land, but why would you just turn into ashes out of that?
Why would you pay for a coffin to just like litter the ocean? I don't know.
That's my thought, but I'd be worried like, am I still in there like alive? Like I don't even want to think about getting dropped in the ocean like that.
(44:15):
That's putting too many of my fears together. Yeah, it's like too many things at once. So yeah.
But apparently you can. I found that out on TikTok. So, you didn't know. Beach? No, no. Deep ocean? Okay.
Did you all have unexpected feedback or positive reviews from people when they were using the dead book that you weren't prepared to hear? Like feedback that you didn't know you were going to get because this is such, like y'all said, such a vulnerable time in people's lives.
(44:48):
We got a lot of feedback about the name. Not a lot. Some people don't like the name.
People don't like the name because I think they're scared to talk about death.
Yeah. And that's what it's called. And that's part of the mission is to kind of smack people in the face with it. So the name is the name.
You're more tied into this realm than I am. Yeah, I think we, it's been overwhelmingly positive feedback from day one and it's been something that's helped us continue to carry forward.
(45:15):
When you get the kind of feedback we've received, it really makes you feel like you're making a difference in the world and you can help people. And so you just want to keep going.
And surprisingly, when we did first launch, we launched a physical book and we thought, you know, the older generation wouldn't be comfortable with the tech platform.
And I think that is the most shocking feedback we've received. It was a lot of the 55 plus community actually saying they would like to see a tech version of this.
(45:39):
Wow. Yeah.
And I think there's a lot of people in the nursing profession, either general nursing or a lot of kind of palliative care, hospice nurses that just reach out and say, this is a fantastic idea.
I deal with this, you know, on a daily basis. And, you know, if people could just leverage a tool like this, I think it can make the process just so much easier on folks.
(46:03):
Yeah. And I would say that was shocking feedback too, because we had done our market research, as we said, we knew that there really wasn't a product like this out there other than like a few physical items out there.
And to me, I'm like, it is 2024. It's not like it's like some big creative idea. Like it's literally a storage platform for documents that loved ones will need.
(46:24):
So it was kind of shocking even hearing from like people within the profession, funeral directors, hospice nurses to be like, there's nothing like this on the market. You know, what do you mean?
Yeah.
Because people don't like saying the word dead. Like even when people pass away, they would say like, oh, I had someone pass away. They don't just say like they're dead. They're gone.
Like, they're dead, dead, dead, dead. Like no one wants to say that word. It's like people don't even like to say it.
(46:47):
And I think that's why also some people are like, if you talk about grief and they have an experience, they're like, oh, that's so negative. Like, don't bring that energy towards me.
It's like, is it negative when it literally happened to me? And like, I'm the one feeling the negative things. Like, you just have to hear about it. Like, what the hell? I think that's crazy.
You know, I always laugh about this too. Like as a society, we are so comfortable saying things like, oh my God, kill me now.
(47:10):
Or like laughing at a joke and being like, I am dead. That is so funny. But we can't actually say like, I'm going to die.
Yeah.
Talking about death. All right. Yeah. So it takes a little bit to break through and like actually talk about it and feel comfortable talking about it just because of the societal intricacies that we're talking about.
Like inevitably any conversation about death turns back to a conversation about life, right? It's okay. I am eventually going to die. What am I doing with my time here?
(47:40):
And how do I want to spend my time? And where do I want to put my energy on? What do I want my legacy to be?
And it turns into being kind of a beautiful conversation about life and legacy and not morose.
I'm going to die one day kind of conversation that everyone thinks it's going to be. So give it a try.
Hey.
(48:02):
What do you want people to walk away knowing about the dead book and any advice to people like when should you start thinking about this?
Like what are kind of some main takeaways you want people to walk away with to like know like I need to learn about the dead book?
When do I need to start thinking about this?
(48:24):
If you have kids, you own a house, if you're married, if you're dating or in a serious relationship, if you have someone else to worry about, you should begin thinking about this.
Hate to be that person that says it, but you just never know. My mom was healthy as an ox and she had just retired two years prior and had a physical two months before and she was healthy and she just died one day.
(48:51):
So unfortunately, we just never know when that's going to happen. So if you have someone you care about, it's time to start thinking about creating a plan for them. Should something happen to you?
I would also say that like if you're death curious and you just don't even know where to begin when it comes to planning or talking about death or even if you have a parent who is not open to sharing their plans with you,
(49:12):
follow us, come learn more about the dead book and we can we can help you through some of those conversations.
You can email us or DM us. If you ever have like specific questions and want content on that, we have a community now of everybody from like therapists to estate planning law firms to nurses that we can actually ask those questions to and bring you advice and content.
(49:34):
So again, you know, we want to be so much more than a product. We want to be a platform and an outlet for people who are just wanting to learn more.
And so that's one thing I would say about that book is just, you know, come ask your questions and we'll try to get them answered for you.
That's amazing because you really don't know. Like you said, your mom was healthy. Like my mom was an almond mom, like a health nut, like don't use a microwave, all this type of stuff.
(49:58):
And she got cancer and died. My mom did everything and she died. So I'm going to live my life. Let's think. I still try to eat healthy, but like I'm not going to overthink it because it can happen anyway.
So like, what is the point about stressing out about every little thing? If it could happen anyway, try to be healthy. You try to live a good life, but like, you don't know what kind of card you're dealt.
(50:20):
And even with my mom, when she was sick, she wanted me to be a power of attorney. And I was really stubborn about it because I was like, no, that means that you're going to die.
And I was like, so denial of that. And so I never filed the paper. I never completed it. And so we ended up having to go go appropriate and the thank you to my brother, like stepped up and took care of everything.
But I'm sure if I had just filed it, it would have been so much easier. But I was just like, I won't do this. Like I was just like, I can't.
(50:48):
And it's hard to take away the emotional piece of something like that, which is like, there's so much legal shit you have to deal with that it's like you just have to do it.
But it's really hard because like it signifies so much where I was like so avoidant of that. And then thankfully, I have a brother that like he handled everything.
(51:10):
He did the core. He did all the stuff. But I was just like, I don't want to do this. But it is really important to just do it because unfortunately, when someone dies, they don't just die.
It's like everything that's left behind explodes and you have to figure it out. And you just kind of have to do it even if you don't want to, which is like the hard part.
Yeah. And I mean, to your point, Rachel, like I said earlier, like he put this book together and went through all the trouble and research and process of actually piecing it all together and putting it in a central place and calling me and saying, hey, come to the house and going through it with me and telling me where it was.
(51:48):
But I just I was avoidant of I don't want to have this conversation because you have to address that my mother is mortal and this person that I hold so dear to me is one day not going to be here anymore.
Right. And I think she probably sensed that. And that's why there was a two page letter at the beginning telling me she probably told me I just didn't want to didn't want to hear it.
(52:12):
But yeah, I mean, it's it's something none of us ever want to think about, but it's necessary for sure.
Well, I love what y'all are doing and not just in the product form, but in the culture aspect of it, too, of trying to in some ways destigmatize conversations around death and estate planning and making sure that the the wills and what the people that we love actually want done happens.
(52:40):
I wish I wish I had met y'all sooner and earlier in life because man, y'all would have helped me a ton.
Kendall, we'll get you some dead bugs just say or you're allowed to.
I'm making one for myself.
Now, yeah, yeah.
But for other people also listening who have found themselves in very similar situations, how can people find you? How can they connect with you? How can they stay up to date with you? If you'll have any announcements coming out that you want to share, like, let's get you plugged with our listeners so they can learn more and tap into these resources.
(53:15):
Yeah, so we are dead book.co on Tiktok and Instagram. You also have a blue sky, but admittedly, I'm a little scared of blue sky, but I'm blue sky. If you want to follow us, I didn't even know we had one.
We're also on LinkedIn as dead book and you know we share a lot of fun business updates on LinkedIn that you don't necessarily see on Instagram or Tiktok. The big news is that we are a tech company now and that is going to allow us pivot very quickly and you know, take your feedback and make product enhancements really quickly just based on feedback.
(53:48):
So again, if you ever have any ideas for dead book.
Email us hello at the dead book.co and that's our website as well the dead book.co and we are open to all suggestions and feedback.
Amazing. Thank you all so much. Thank you so much for coming on.
Of course we really appreciate it. And we're just so grateful to be a part of this community truly. Yeah. Thank you.
(54:12):
The community has been actually really amazing. Yeah, realize we've been Griever's for a while, but we haven't entered. I feel like the grief community till last year and we're like, oh, we should have been talking about this and dealing with it a lot sooner.
Yeah, like a small little bubble, but when you find it amazing. Yeah, super supportive. And I just I'm very thankful to have found this community and be able to be a part of it. And thank you guys for the work that you're doing within it.
(54:39):
Thank you. And I think this product will definitely help a ton of our listeners and already helped so many of your own. So it very excited to hear about new things coming out with you all.
Yeah, when I heard about it, I was like, okay, Kendall would definitely find this useful because you know, yeah, Kendall, even like she'll talk to me like, oh, I called this person I called that I'm like, you're really thinking about that.
And it's because she had handled all that. She's very proactive of like, I want my siblings to be prepared for everything like very much the older sister that's like trying to take care of them and like make everything super easy for them.
(55:11):
So I was like, I know Kendall will love this product because she had to go through it all on her own, for the most part, and she's very proactive about making sure that everyone else will be prepared or be taken care of.
She's not leaving anytime soon, but just be prepared.
She will be prepared.
(55:32):
It's better to be prepared.
It's true. So Kendall will be your number one fan.
We'll get you a t-shirt.
So we're following you along. Hopefully, TikTok will still be a thing. Hopefully, there'll be a Hail Mary. I feel like that is like the best growing community. So hopefully that exists still when this comes out. It'll be on the 21st. We'll know by the time this comes out if TikTok is still a thing.
(55:58):
We'll see.
But yeah, follow them on their platforms. I've been watching all their videos and learning about the product and this was such a great conversation. So thank you again for joining us.
Appreciate it. Bye, everyone.
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