If it happens tonight: what your family can actually open

What your family will not have

• Your phone. It locks itself, and after a few wrong guesses it locks harder.
• Your email. The password is in your head or in a password manager on the locked phone.
• Your recovery codes. Those exist so that you can get back into your own accounts. They were never meant for anyone else, and nobody else knows where they are.
• Your memory. Which bank, which policy, which storage unit.

So the test for any arrangement is simple. Could the people you love open it tomorrow morning, using only things that are already theirs?

What each person needs instead

With a SuddenGone envelope, each person you named needs two things, and both belong to them, not to you.

1. Their own email address. That is where their link arrives. They never sign in to anything of yours.
2. Their own key. Usually that is the card you sent them: a short code on paper, in a text or in an email, which they have had since the day you made it. If the card was lost or never reached them, a backup key can stand in: a question only that person can answer, which you chose.

Your own password and your own recovery code play no part. Those are for you, while you are alive.

What happens, in order

1. Someone you allowed to report opens their own SuddenGone link and tells us, with a copy of the death certificate. The funeral home supplies those.
2. If they cannot find the email with their link, they go to the page for families, type their own email address, and we send the link again.
3. A person at SuddenGone checks the certificate. We write to you, in case it is a mistake, and to everyone else you named, any of whom can stop it.
4. A waiting period runs. You chose its length, from 7 to 30 days.
5. The envelope opens. If you asked one person to go first and tidy up, theirs opens before the others. Each person gets an email with a link, and opens it with their card or their answer.
6. Inside is a short list of what to do first, built from what you wrote: keep the phone charged, here is the passcode, open the email, these bills must keep being paid.

If nobody knew there was an envelope

This is the quiet failure. You filled everything in and told no one. Three things guard against it.

• The note we send when you name someone. It tells them they were chosen and what the card is for. Let it be sent.
• A one-page sheet for the fridge. It says an envelope exists, who holds a card and where to start. It carries no secrets, so it can sit in plain sight.
• The page for families. A relative who only suspects you used SuddenGone can ask our staff to look. We will not open anything for them, but we can reach the people you did name.

What to do today so that it works

1. Name at least one person, and a second in case the first cannot do it.
2. Send each of them their card the moment you make it. Text it, email it or print it. A card you are still meaning to hand over is no card.
3. Add a backup question for each person. Pick something only they would know and would not have to think about.
4. Ask them to try the card once. It takes two minutes and opens nothing.
5. Put the phone passcode and your main email sign-in in the envelope before anything else. See why those two come first.

What cannot be done, so you can plan around it

• We cannot open an envelope for someone you did not name.
• We cannot open one without the card or the answer. If a person has lost the card and you never set a question for them, their envelope stays shut. Another named person's still opens.
• We cannot skip the waiting period, however urgent it feels. It is there so that a mistake or a lie can be stopped.