When the honoree dies
What happens to the archive, what stops, and what is never invoiced.
Tell the studio. A name and a date is enough. Nothing else is needed and nothing will be asked of you.
Everything on this page happens without you having to arrange it.
What stops immediately
- Invoicing. No invoice is issued, for anything, in the period following a death. Renewals due in that window are moved, not waived and not chased.
- Scheduled contact. Stewardship notes, annual accounts, anniversary notes — all held.
- Automation. Every note you receive from this point is written by a person and read by a person before it goes anywhere.
You do not need to answer anything. If you would rather have no contact at all for a while, say so once and there will be none.
What changes on the archive
Nothing, unless you ask.
The studio does not edit an archive on the news of a death. It does not add a date, change a tense, alter a photograph, or put anything on the front of it. An archive that changes character overnight without the family deciding it should is a small violation at a moment with no room for one.
When you are ready — which may be weeks or may be a year — there is one conversation about what should change. Families most often ask for some of the following:
- The date recorded, in whatever form they choose
- The archive opened up, so shipmates who did not have the address can find it
- The guest wall watched more closely, because it is about to get busy
- A section added for what people said at the service
- Nothing at all
All of it is reversible. None of it is required.
Access, if the honoree held it
If the honoree was the account holder, custody moves to whoever they named. If nobody was named, it moves to next of kin on attestation.
This is the reason the studio asks about successors at handover, uncomfortable as that conversation is. See naming who holds it next.
The guest wall
Expect it to become active. People who served with someone often find the archive in the weeks after a death, and they write at length.
Every entry is read before it surfaces. Anything likely to land badly — a detail the family may not know, an account of a bad day, someone writing while drunk at two in the morning — is held and brought to you privately first. You decide whether it goes up.
At year end the studio will offer to compile what people wrote into a single formatted letter to the family. Many families keep it.
The date
Once the date is recorded, nothing ever fires in that window again. No invoice, no renewal, no stewardship note, no automated anything, in that window, for as long as the archive exists.
Where the relationship supports it, one handwritten line. That is all.
Closing the archive
If the family decides the archive should not continue, closing it is free. Always, at any point, with no notice period and no final invoice.
A full export is delivered first, and confirmed received, before anything is taken down. See export.
If this happens mid-commission
Work stops where it stands and is held indefinitely. No invoice is issued. Nothing you have already paid is consumed by the pause.
When and if you want to continue, the studio picks up from where it stopped. Some families finish the archive and find it was the right thing to have done. Some do not continue, and ask for their materials back instead. Both are ordinary and neither needs explaining.
[DECISION NEEDED: state the fast-contact path and the response commitment in hours for a family reporting a death.]