After the funeral

The days after a funeral are often harder than the days before it. Everyone who was rallying round goes home, the arranging stops, and the loss arrives properly.

Almost nothing on the list below has to be done this week. The ashes can stay with the funeral director or the crematorium for as long as you need. The memorial cannot go up for months in any case. The estate has no deadline for most purposes.

Two things are worth attending to reasonably promptly: telling the organisations that need to know, so that letters stop arriving and nothing accrues against the estate, and dealing with the property if a house is standing empty. The rest can wait until you are ready.

After a cremation the ashes are usually ready within a few days, and the crematorium or your funeral director will tell you when. They will hold them at no charge, generally for a long period, and will confirm how long.

There is no need to decide anything at the point of collection. Many families keep the ashes at home for a year or more while they settle on what to do, and dividing them between people is lawful and common.

When you are ready, the options are set out in what to do with cremation ashes, with more detail in burying ashes, places to scatter ashes in the UK and interment of ashes.

If this was not finished before the funeral, it is the task that most repays getting on with. Banks, pensions, insurers, utilities, the council, the DVLA, subscriptions and memberships all need to be told, and Tell Us Once covers many government departments in a single step.

Keep one written list with the date, the reference number and who you spoke to. You will be asked the same questions repeatedly, and the list saves the worst of it. The full order of work is in who to notify after a death.

Online accounts are separate and easily forgotten – email, photographs, social media, and anything paying out monthly. See dealing with social media accounts after a death. Do not log in as them, however tempting; each service has its own bereavement process.

Settling someone's affairs is called administering the estate. If there is a will, the executors named in it do this and apply for a grant of probate where one is needed. If there is no will, the closest relative entitled to inherit applies for letters of administration instead – see when someone dies without a will.

Not every estate needs a grant at all. Small holdings are often released on a death certificate and an indemnity form, and anything held jointly, along with most pensions and policies written in trust, passes outside the estate. Ask each bank or provider whether they will need a grant; their answer decides it.

It usually takes months rather than weeks, and there is rarely a reason to rush. Where the estate is complicated, where property is involved, or where it may not cover its debts, take advice before distributing anything – an administrator who gets it wrong can be personally liable. This is general information rather than legal advice.

The funeral bill usually arrives shortly after the funeral. Banks will generally release money from the person's own account to pay it, even before probate, if you send them the invoice directly – this is one of the few things they will do straight away.

An existing funeral plan or an insurance policy may cover part or all of it. If money is a worry, there is help: Funeral Expenses Payment in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, Funeral Support Payment in Scotland, and the Children's Funeral Fund where the person who died was under 18. Time limits apply to the first two, so ask early rather than late.

See how to reduce funeral costs, and tell your funeral director if paying is going to be difficult. It is a conversation they have often.

A new grave has to settle before a headstone can be fixed, which usually takes several months and sometimes longer. That waiting time is not wasted – inscriptions chosen quickly are the ones families later wish they had thought about.

The permission comes first in every case. Only the person who holds the exclusive right of burial can authorise a memorial on a grave, and the cemetery, crematorium or parish sets the rules on size, material and wording.

There is more on the choices in what to put on a headstone, memorial plaques, memorial vases, garden memorials and memorial jewellery. None of it has to be decided at once, and a memorial can be added to years later.

Thank-you notes are a kindness, not an obligation, and nobody is counting the weeks. A short line is enough, and a single notice in the local paper or online is perfectly acceptable in place of individual cards.

The funeral flowers are usually left at the crematorium or the graveside, and many families ask for them to go on to a hospice, a care home or a hospital instead. Say so on the day; it is easily arranged and it is often the part people are gladdest of afterwards.

As for clothes and belongings, there is no right moment and no obligation to be efficient about it. Where a house has to be cleared for practical reasons, it helps to put anything you are unsure about into one box rather than deciding item by item.

Many people find the weeks after the funeral the hardest part. The arrangements gave the days a shape, and now they do not. Other people go back to work and stop asking. None of that means anything has gone wrong.

Grief is not a sequence to be completed, and there is no schedule to be behind. If you are struggling, or you would simply rather talk to someone outside the family, support is free and you do not have to be in crisis to use it. Samaritans are on 116 123, day or night. Cruse Bereavement Support are on 0808 808 1677, and Cruse Scotland on 0808 802 6161.

See coping with grief and loss and helpful organisations for grief and bereavement. The first anniversary, and the first birthday and Christmas, are worth planning for rather than being surprised by.

The three things people most often need next.