In 2019, a family member died very suddenly, and it was a horrendous time. It was completely out of the blue. It wasn't her time, but it happened, and we had to face it together as a family, in the middle of our grief.
She had always been flamboyant, a larger than life character who knew seemingly everyone. You couldn't go anywhere without her stopping to talk to someone she knew. Over the years she'd made all the offhand comments about what she wanted, saying she'd have a pink coffin and everyone would wear pink, and because she was religious there were favourite hymns she'd mention, saying "Oh, I want that one at my funeral." But they were always just passing remarks, said in the moment, because she was still in her prime and she wasn't ready to think about any of it properly.
And then she was gone, and within days we found ourselves registering the death, arranging to meet funeral directors, sifting through her mail, and working our way through her address book, all while trying to grieve.
She had set up a funeral plan, though we only found it eventually after sifting through countless bits of paperwork in her house. But there was no pink coffin, just a normal one, and no wishes left about her funeral at all. No hymns, no dress code, nothing. We sat in front of the funeral director and really struggled, because she was such a larger than life character and her funeral should have captured all of that, yet we were left asking ourselves what she would actually have wanted.
In the end we took the decision to dress her ourselves, and we did her hair and her makeup, but even trying to agree on what to dress her in was a nightmare. Choosing the photograph for the order of service was the same, hours spent trying to agree on the right one. We sat for hours more trying to remember all the hymns she had mentioned she liked. She had known everybody in life, and we wanted to be sure they all heard of her passing, but we had no idea where to even begin.
Then there was everything else. She had a house to sell, along with numerous bank accounts, pensions and insurance policies, and we spent hours phoning company after company, working from a scrap of old mail we'd found in a drawer, only to be told time and again, "No, that was cancelled five years ago." It was a long administrative nightmare that took us over a year to work through, getting everything in the house sorted and over to the solicitor alongside the house sale, and Covid didn't help matters either.
After all of this, and then another family death in 2023 that left us facing the very same unanswered questions all over again, the idea for Exit Plan Legacy was born.
At first it was simply the idea for a funeral app, a way to capture more detail about what people actually want for their send off, because even if they can't be there themselves, it would be a comfort to know they'd had their say.
But it grew into something much bigger, an end of life management platform, because the funeral was never the only issue. The real heartbreak was the hours of searching and calling, the failed passwords and the dead ends, and above all the sheer frustration that a process like this is so disorganised, when the people left to handle it are heartbroken, grieving family members who want nothing more than to go into a quiet corner and cry.
Exit Plan Legacy is a platform for anyone to organise their affairs and keep them current, so there are no nasty surprises, no "sorry, that was cancelled last year," and no arriving to book the wake at a restaurant that closed down five years ago. Everything is up to date and can be edited at any time, completed at your own pace, module by module. There's even a "My Story" book you can fill in along the way if you'd like to, skipping a chapter or adding a chapter as you go, because it's your book to write.
The platform can help with the bigger things too, like funeral plans and wills that so often aren't in place, because the less a family has to deal with when a loved one dies, the better. Putting these things in place early takes away so much stress, and can even prevent the family disagreements that grief and uncertainty can bring. Exit Plan Legacy has partnered with trusted local and national funeral directors and solicitors who can be accessed if you need them, with no obligation and no requirement to have any of it set up in order to use the platform, but they're there, and they're well worth thinking about.
The hardest part was always the idea that people don't think they need this until they know they're dying, or until they're older. But people die suddenly every day, as we know only too well, and Exit Plan Legacy lets you put everything in place now and update it whenever things change, so that if anything were ever to happen, your family can grieve properly without spending precious time searching or guessing.
It's peace of mind for the people you love, for less than the price of a coffee a month.
The Exit Plan Legacy Team