Closing their accounts, one call at a time
By Rachel · Updated 2026-07-21 · 2 min read
The short answer
Closing a person's accounts after they die means announcing their death to one company after another, each with its own hold music, security questions and script. It is exhausting because every call repeats the loss to a stranger, and because some accounts (the gym, the subscription, the loyalty card) never quite get the message. It helps to batch the calls into blocks, ask for the bereavement team by name, log every call in one place, and let someone take a share of the list.
The account number is on a sticky note in front of you, because you have read it out four times already today.
The hold music is the same cheerful loop at the bank, the pension, the phone company. You could hum it now.
Then a person answers, and you say the sentence again. My husband died. My mum died. My dad died. You say it flat, because by the fourth time it comes out flat.
I made these calls for my dad. There were far more of them than I could have imagined.
Saying it again, and again
Nobody warns you that closing a person's accounts means announcing their death, one company at a time, to strangers who are reading from a script.
Each call asks the same questions. The date. Your relationship to the deceased. Whether you are authorised to discuss the account. The account holder is the person who died. That is why you are calling.
Each call asks you to say it out loud again, to a stranger, as if for the first time.
Some of them are kind. A bereavement team that says "take your time," that has clearly done this a thousand times and still softens. Those calls you remember.
Others put you on hold to cancel a direct debit and play you an advert for a loan.
Their phone is its own reckoning, the passwords and the profiles, a separate afternoon you are not ready for yet.
The ones that don't get the message
And then there are the accounts that never quite let go.
The gym that keeps emailing their name, cheerful reminders about a class they will not be attending. The subscription that renews on the anniversary. The loyalty card still earning points on a shop they will never walk into again.
So many of you have told me about the letter that arrives months later, addressed to them, asking why they have not been in touch.
You did everything right. You sent the certificate. You sat through the hold music. And the machine, somewhere, still thinks they are alive.
Why it costs so much
It looks like admin. It is filed under admin. You do it at a desk, with a notebook and a pen.
But every account you close makes it a little more true. The number retired. The email deactivated. The name lifted off the list.
This is not paperwork getting in the way of grief. This is grief, wearing a lanyard, done by phone.
If it helps: batch the calls into blocks, so the wound is not spread thin across every afternoon. Ask for the bereavement team by name. Log every call in one place, because grief-brain will lose the thread and you will need that reference number again.
And let someone take a few of the calls for you. Splitting the list is not handing the admin away; it is surviving it.
You will reach the bottom of the list eventually. The last account. The final confirmation email, we're sorry to see you go.
And a loyalty card, somewhere in a drawer, still quietly earning them points.
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