The "So Lisa Doesn't Have to Figure It Out Alone" Memo

My father had his first heart attack at 38. I had mine at 37. He died at 56. I'm 65.

My grandfather went the same way, a little earlier. Heart, stroke, gone before retirement. This is the family pattern, and I've known about it long enough that it stopped feeling like a threat and started feeling like a schedule. Not a morbid one. More like a departure board. You check it, you plan accordingly, you don't pretend the flights aren't leaving.

The memo started before we left to travel, because I'm a lawyer and I've watched what happens to families when someone dies without one. The surviving spouse, usually blindsided and grieving, suddenly has to become a financial detective. What accounts exist? Where are the passwords? Who's the attorney? Is there a will? Where is it? Which bills are on autopay? What's the PIN on the storage unit?

That's a terrible thing to do to someone you love. The memo is how I avoid doing it to Lisa.

What It Actually Is

The memo lives in 1Password, which we share. It's a few pages long. I update it on the first of every month — sometimes more often, for reasons I'll get to. It covers everything I can think of that Lisa would need to handle if I died, organized roughly by urgency.

The first section is the first 72 hours. Not weeks. Hours. That's intentional.

Call the estate attorney. Order 20 death certificates — not two, not five, twenty, because every financial institution, insurance company, and government agency will want one and you don't want to wait three weeks for a reorder while accounts are in limbo. Do not cancel credit cards yet. That last one matters more than it sounds.

The rest of the memo covers accounts, insurance policies, where physical documents live, what the Seychelles company is and how to let it quietly expire, how to access my laptop and phone, and a section on points and miles that is more complicated than it has any right to be.

Passwords

Everything runs through 1Password. That's where the credit card numbers live, the bank logins, the insurance policy numbers, the two-factor backup codes. If Lisa can't get into 1Password, she can't get into anything.

Getting into 1Password requires my memorized master password — which I've told her — and the Secret Key, a separate alphanumeric string that 1Password generates and that cannot be recovered if lost. That key is written down and hidden in our luggage. Copies have been shared with family members.

Your password manager is the master key to your digital life. If your partner can't access it within the first few hours, a lot of doors stay locked at exactly the wrong time.

There's also Apple to contend with. Our photos — eleven years of them, across 120 countries — live in iCloud. So do my Obsidian backups, which is where my writing lives. Apple's two-factor authentication means that accessing my account requires a code sent to my devices. The memo specifically warns Lisa: do not remove devices or authorized phone numbers from the account until everything has been retrieved and preserved. Apple, even with a death certificate and a court order, may not help. This is not hypothetical. It's documented policy.

There is a partial fix. Apple introduced a Legacy Contact feature that lets you designate someone to access your account after you die — no 2FA required, no court order, just a specific access key Apple generates when you set it up. If you haven't done this, do it today. It takes five minutes and it's the difference between your partner retrieving eleven years of photos and losing them permanently.

Points and Miles

If you're reading this, you probably have a lot of points. And if you're in the middle of a credit card bonus or working toward a big redemption, you might have a lot more than usual right now.

Here's what most people don't know: airline miles are not your property. Legally, they're a license granted by the airline, which means most programs don't have to transfer them to your estate when you die. Some will, with documentation and fees and months of process. Many won't. Delta closes the account and the miles go with it. Southwest is explicit in its terms that points cannot be transferred as part of a will or inheritance.

The practical solution is that Lisa has the login credentials for every account. She can log in and use the miles directly. That's not fraud; it's access. But she has to know the accounts exist, know the credentials, and know which ones are expiring soonest. United Travel Bank has about $3,200 that expires in roughly two years. Lifemiles and Air France have short expiration windows. The memo flags these specifically.

This section requires more frequent updating than anything else. If I'm mid-spend on a new card, chasing a 75,000-point bonus that requires $15,000 in purchases over three months, Lisa needs to know that. She needs to know which card, what the threshold is, how far along we are, and what happens if the spending stops. Missing a bonus threshold because I died and nobody knew we were working toward it is a bad outcome. It's also an avoidable one.

It's not uncommon for me to be working toward another million points over the course of 60 to 90 days, with free hotel nights accumulating in parallel and transfer bonuses expiring on their own schedule. All of those pieces are moving all the time. A once-a-month update doesn't cover it. When the financial picture is actively changing, the memo changes with it.

One detail most people miss: the memo should specify which card to use to finish which spend, and where that card physically is. Login credentials are useful. A card that's locked in a hospital bag in a foreign country is not.

What the Memo Can't Do

I want to be honest about this, because the honest version is more useful than the reassuring one.

The memo covers what can be figured out in advance. It doesn't cover everything.

If I die in Kathmandu — and we've been there, and it's not an abstract place — bodies move to the burning ghats within hours. That's the local arrangement. It may or may not align with what you'd want. Shipping a body internationally is a bureaucratic and logistical undertaking that no document prepares you for, and the decisions involved are partly practical, partly cultural, partly just things you have to figure out in the moment in a foreign country where you don't speak the language and you're in shock.

Do you know the ambulance number for the country you're currently in? Not 911 — the actual local number. There are apps that give you this. We keep one on our phones. But that's not in the memo either, because the memo is about what happens after, not what happens during.

Covering what can be covered — financial accounts, insurance policies, legal contacts, digital access, the storage unit code — removes a substantial amount of chaos from an already chaotic situation. It doesn't eliminate it. It just takes a significant piece of it off the table.

Making One

The mechanics are less important than the decision to do it. Whatever format you use, wherever you store it, the goal is that your partner can find it, access it, and understand it without calling you for help.

It took me a while to understand why I started the memo before we ever left home, when my life was comparatively simple. The answer is that I've never assumed I had unlimited time. My family has a way of leaving early, and I've been watching that pattern long enough to take it seriously without being paralyzed by it.

The travel, the nomad life, the relentless forward motion — they're all part of the same response to the same information. You go, because the going is the point. And you build the memo, because someone you love is going with you and deserves not to be left standing in a foreign city holding nothing but questions.

That's not morbid. That's just love with a checklist attached.