Becky Robison lost her mother in 2020. She lost her father only three years later in 2023. She then launched the website deadparentswhatnow.com in 2024, transforming her experience with loss into a new business — and an opportunity to develop community around the topic of death care.
“My mom died of liver disease. Obviously, it was very sad, but my dad was still there to help handle the logistics of post-death everything,” she said. “Then in 2023, shortly after I moved [from Chicago] to Louisville, my dad died of pancreatic cancer.” It fell on Robison to navigate post-death logistics. She soon acknowledged that she had no idea what she was doing.
She expected grief. She understood that she would have to prepare herself for the unequivocal emotional experience of losing a loved one. But she did not know that she would also have to prepare herself for paperwork. Even as her father was dying in hospice, Robison was confronted by complex logistical decisions. “Financial decisions, legal decisions … I knew my dad would have a will, but I didn’t know what I should do with that. I found his will in a box by the Christmas decorations!”
She asked her friend’s parents, as well as her own aunts and uncles, because all of their parents had already died. “I thought, they’ll know what to do. And they really didn’t. Either grief dominated their memories, or they had simply hired lawyers to do everything.” She wanted to do something about this experience that so many people will eventually encounter — particularly Millennials, a demographic cohort whose parents are Baby Boomers and older Generation X approaching their twilight years. Soon enough, many people of Robison’s generation will have to make funeral arrangements and initiate probate procedures.
“I’m a Millennial, so I asked the internet,” Robison said, in her signature playful way. “I was able to find information, but I was only able to find it very far-scattered and on many different websites.” Unable to find a centralized source of information about post-death logistics in America, she tweeted, “would anyone like a ‘My Parents Are Dead: What Now?’ guide if I put one together?” Her tweet went viral. She received an unexpected volume of feedback from people whose parents had died and wished they had something like that, as well as from people whose parents were dying and were unsure what to do next. “I decided, well, if these random people on the internet think I can do this, then I can I can probably do this.”
“I created deadparents.com, because I have a gallows sense of humor, and it got pretty popular pretty quickly.” Her newly launched website was shared by multiple newsletters, and attracted 20,000 visits within its first month. Robison is both surprised by and grateful for the success she has already received. “I didn’t know this was going to happen to me, but now I’ve created a job for myself in this post-death education space.”
Robison is a writer by trade. In undergraduate college, she was an English and History double major. She then earned a graduate degree in Creative Writing before working in corporate communications. “So I figured I would create a website and put all of the information up there that I learned as I went, and it could be a sort of a living document to teach people how to do this.”
While a career in death care might sometimes activate Robison’s grief over the loss of her parents, it also helps her heal. “I think that this work is very much an expression of my grief. I am one of those people who has to laugh at things, or else I will cry,” she said. “Not that crying is bad, but I think that laughter [can help] you cope with things. It’s a physical response, the same way crying is.”
Her mother was a therapist and her father was an architect. They were both small business owners. “My mom helped thousands of clients over the years,” she said. “And my dad literally put roofs over people’s heads. And that’s a lot to live up to. So I hope that what I’m doing makes me feel like, if I can help people — even a little bit — that something good can come out of this mess.”
Follow My Parents Are Dead: What Now? on Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram (“Things are really popping on Instagram. It’s a fun time over there.”), Threads, and TikTok, under the handle “Dead Parents What Now?” Robison also publishes a weekly newsletter called The Columbarium, named for the architectural structure that stores cremation remains on cemetery grounds “because it too has a bunch of little niches for different information.” A book based on the website, titled “My Parents Are Dead: What Now? A Practical Guide to Your Life After Their Death,” is scheduled for publication by Quirk Books in January 2026.
“Dad would think it was very funny that I got a book deal based on his death,” Robison says with a gentle laugh. “He would be like, ‘yes, this is the American dream. Profit off of my death. That is the best you can do.’ He would love that.”
This article appears in Jan 17-30, 2025.
