The first two weeks after your child dies

Somebody is going to hand you a folder.

It will have a funeral home's name on the front and a pen clipped to it, and you will be expected to make decisions out of it while you are still wearing the clothes you had on when your child died. That is the part nobody warns you about. Not the grief — everyone warns you about the grief. The admin. The way the world asks for paperwork from a person who cannot currently remember their own address.

I cannot make the next two weeks smaller. What I can do is tell you what is actually inside them, so that fewer things arrive as a shock.

In our house the shape of those two weeks was people in the same rooms. Family and friends around almost constantly, everybody sad, everybody quietly watching whoever was having the worst hour and sitting closer to them. Very little of it was organized. People simply did not leave.

One note before we start. This is a map, not advice. Where anything legal or medical comes up I will say so and point you at the person whose job it is.

I am Danny H. Levin — founder, and part of Austin's family. The Undefeated Fund exists because our nephew died of childhood cancer.

What has to happen in the first few days?

Less than it feels like. In the first days the genuinely fixed items are short: the death has to be formally recorded, someone has to take care of your child's body, and if you are holding a service, a date and a place have to be chosen. Nearly everything else that arrives this week is optional, even when it is handed to you urgently.

In the United States the death certificate is normally handled between the medical professional who certifies the death and the funeral home. You are usually supplying information and signing things rather than filing anything yourself. How many certified copies you will eventually need is a real question with a boring answer that varies by state — ask the funeral director. It is exactly the kind of thing they know and you should not have to go looking for.

You are also allowed to be a customer this week, however strange that feels. Under the Federal Trade Commission's Funeral Rule — the FTC's consumer page on it was last updated in 2024 — a funeral home must give you a General Price List you can keep, must quote prices over the phone without you identifying yourself, and cannot make you buy a package when you only want part of it. You can say no to things. You can take the price list to the kitchen table and read it tomorrow.

Who do I have to call?

Fewer people than you believe, and you do not have to be the one who calls them. There is usually one call that has to come from the family — the funeral home — and after that, almost every other notification can be made by somebody else holding a list and your phone.

Some of it happens without you. The Social Security Administration's page on what to do when someone dies says plainly that funeral homes generally report a death to them, so families usually do not need to make that call themselves. Schools, insurers, employers, the pharmacy, the hospital billing office — none of those need your voice specifically. They need the facts said once, correctly, by anyone.

What helps is appointing one person who is not you. They take the phone, they make the calls, they keep a sheet of paper with who has been told and what was said, and they stop the same conversation happening eleven times. If a friend asks what they can do, this is the job. Hand them the post on what to actually say to a grieving parent on the way out.

In our family the calls and the arrangements were handled by his mom, his dad and his sisters. That is the usual pattern and it is worth naming out loud, because the people standing closest to the child are the ones who end up doing the paperwork of losing them.

What can wait, and what cannot?

Almost everything can wait. The list of things that genuinely cannot is short enough to hold in your head, and the rest of it — the mail, the accounts, the bedroom — will still be there in a month, when you are a fraction more able to look at it.

This week:

• Decisions about your child's body, and the date of the service.
• Anything you have been told in writing has a deadline. If you are not sure whether something does, ask the funeral director, or a lawyer or accountant if it is financial. Do not take my word for it and do not take a relative's.
• Food, medication and some kind of sleep for the people living in your house.
• Telling your other children the truth, in words that match their age.

Not this week:

• Thank-you notes. Nobody is counting. Anyone who is counting can wait longer.
• Their room. Their clothes. There is no deadline on any of it, and when you do get there, we have written about that day.
• Social media accounts, phone contracts, subscriptions.
• Any paperwork beyond what the funeral director has asked you for.
• Whether you will ever be able to work again, and what your life is for now. Those questions will come. They are not for these two weeks.

How do I get through the funeral?

In pieces — and you are allowed to design it so the pieces are survivable. The decisions that matter most on the day are not about flowers or music. They are about where your body will be, who is next to it, and how you get out of the room.

Things worth settling in advance: who speaks, and whether that includes you — it does not have to. Who stands either side of you at the door, if there is a receiving line, and whether there is one at all. A signal that means get me out of here, agreed with one person who will act on it without asking why. A stated end time. Someone else holding your phone. Someone else driving.

Two jobs, two different people. One runs the logistics. One has no job except you. Asking the same person to do both is how you end up alone in a side room while they deal with the caterer.

People will tell you afterwards that it was a beautiful service. You may have almost no memory of it. That is not a failure of love and it is not something to apologize for.

One thing we did that I would put in front of another family: we had a shirt made for everyone, and it said Living Undefeated. People wore it that day. The part we did not foresee is that they still wear it — it comes out every year when we gather for his birthday.

A service is one afternoon, and most of what you decide about it will not matter in five years. Without meaning to, we made a thing that comes back.

What do I do about my other children right now?

Tell them the truth in small, plain words. Then repeat it, because younger children will ask the same question again and again, and the answer needs to stay the same. The Dougy Center, which has worked with grieving children since 1982, puts honesty first in its 2018 tip sheet on supporting grieving siblings, and specifically warns against softeners like "went to sleep" — they confuse a child who then has a reason to be afraid of bed.

The same sheet makes two points that are easy to miss in the middle of this. Give them choices about the service — whether to come, where to sit, whether to take any part — rather than deciding for them. And make sure they know they are not responsible for holding the household together, for being happy so you feel better, or for filling the space their brother or sister left.

There is one more thing, and it is hard to read. Young children can quietly conclude they caused it. The National Cancer Institute's patient-version summary on grief and bereavement, updated in 2025, describes this directly: a child may wonder, did I make the death happen?, sometimes because of something they once said in anger. They will rarely volunteer it. It is worth saying out loud, unprompted, that nothing they said or did or thought caused their sibling to die.

We have written more on this, because it is its own subject: supporting a grieving sibling.

And if the same thought is circling in you — that some decision of yours is the reason your child is dead — you are not the only parent carrying that sentence. More parents carry it than ever say it.

And then what?

Then it goes quiet, and the quiet is its own shock. The casserole-to-actual-help ratio in this country is wildly off, and both halves of it tend to stop at roughly the same time. The visitors thin out. The messages slow down. People go back to a life that still works, and your week fourteen looks nothing like your week one.

None of that is a verdict on your friends, though it will feel like one for a while. Some of them disappear for reasons that have nothing to do with you.

What I have found to help, when the admin finally runs out, is not having to be the first person to think of something. Other parents have written this down. Some of it is on the shelf. Some of it is in a room full of people who already know — The Compassionate Friends keeps a locator of local meetings for bereaved families, searchable by state and zip code.

The first ordinary day in our house, for what it is worth, was when people started reading. Nobody suggested it. There was simply nothing left to arrange, and reading was something you could do without having to be any good at it. Most of what ended up on that shelf was read in that stretch.

You do not have to do these two weeks well. There is no well. There is only through, and you are already doing it.

Save this for the day you need it.

Danny H. Levin — founder, and part of Austin's family.

If it has gone further than this

If, at any point in these two weeks or long after them, the thought arrives that you do not want to be here, you are not the first parent to have it and it does not make you a danger to anyone.

The 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is free and confidential, and it is not only for people who have made a plan. Call or text 988, or chat at 988lifeline.org.

You can also text HOME to 741741 to reach the Crisis Text Line.

Call or text 988.