So one of the worst parts about a loved one passing away suddenly (well besides the obvious) is all the stuff you have to handle that you aren’t prepared for. A few days after my mom passed I made a PSA on my Facebook page about this. I should probably title this entry Get Your Shit In Order People but once I finish I think you’ll understand better why its titled this way instead.

Seriously, if a loved one passes is their house in order? Do they have a Will, Life Insurance (who is the beneficiary), do you know what their final wishes are (oh wait till you hear what mom wanted), has an executor to the estate been named? Ok those seem like fairly easy questions to answer and if somebody is prepared for a family members death then you probably have this all lined up. But if you aren’t prepared then get ready for some serious wammies! What about all the weird crazy things people don’t think about. I feel a checklist coming on here people. Lets start with a doozie… Do you know how to get into your loved ones phone? Did I just hear a pin drop!

In this day and age when people are so wrapped up with privacy and everything is on lockdown what happens if somebody dies? Most of our whole lives happen based around our phones and trust me you’ll want to get into that person’s phone for information. Did you know Apple can’t/won’t unlock a phone, those hacks you find on the internet don’t work btw (I tried them), short of a court order you aren’t getting into the one thing that is going to make your life a little easier and help you emotionally process some things too (my mom’s photo album is priceless right now). We are so concerned about keeping our privacy that we don’t even think about what happens if….

Which baits the question why are we so concerned with our privacy that we have to have a passcode on our phone anyway? Oh I get I was in a 16 year marriage where at the end I didn’t want him to see anything I was up to (even turned Find My Phone off which is never a good idea at the rate I lose my phone) and of course this leads us back to EVERYTHING is on our phone including these days all our CC’s, saved passwords, etc.  So yea we need it set to private so if you do lose your phone some jerk doesn’t steal your identity. But, man I miss the simple days when you carried a wallet with your ID, a credit card and you remembered people’s phones numbers or had a small telephone book you wrote them down in. I guess what I’m trying to say here is: do you have somebody in your life you trust, somebody in case of emergency can be “your person”, somebody you can give your passcode too because trust me they’ll need it.

So back to why I started writing this to begin with then I promise I’ll let you go (as a note for future reading I tend to digress a lot so if you are going to follow me get used to it LOL). So the day after my mom passed away I kept trying to get into her phone. Honestly now I’m not exactly sure why that was such a priority but for some reason in the moment it was. So of course I started with my birthday because duh I’m her favorite. Guess my shock when my birthday wasn’t her passcode. I tried a few more codes and again nothing. I searched the internet for ways to get in nothing. Friends searched the internet for me for ways to get in and still nothing. Then my friend Katie came over and brought Shawn and I apple juice and egg sandwhiches (everybody needs a Katie in their life btw) and as we stood in the kitchen and I told her about the phone and I asked her “do you know your moms passcode and she say yea duh its my birthday” and I lost it people like really lost it. I stood in the kitchen and yelled and cried and pouted like a child “why wasn’t I her passcode”, I thought she loved me, I thought I was her favorite…it was crazy people; the wave of emotions I was having, even why I write this I can’t stop the tears from flowing. And then it hit me, like a ton of bricks, it was like she was standing right there….a conversation popped back into my head of a day she and I were sitting on the couch and she was knitting (she was always knitting) and she showed me some goofy Facebook post on her phone and her phone went to lock screen….I showed it to her and said what’s the passcode and she told me and it that moment I heard her words. I immediately snatched the phone back from Katie who was at that point watching some crazy Utube video of how to bipass the lock function and typed in the code and I WAS IN! OMG the relief, I hope you never have to experience it but the relief was incredible. And guess what I was her passcode (just not in the order I thought) and at that moment that one glorious moment I realized she did love me and I was her favorite.