When a parent dies there are perhaps six things that genuinely need doing in the first week, and several dozen that feel urgent and are not. The difference matters, because you are being asked to do administration at the exact moment you are least able to.
This is the order that works. Register the death and get certified copies of the certificate, because almost nothing else can start without them. Find the will if there is one. Tell the small number of organisations that actually need telling now. Secure the property. Then stop, because the rest can genuinely wait, and most of it will take months anyway.
Nothing below is legal advice. Requirements differ by country and sometimes by region, and the registrar you speak to will tell you what applies where you are.
The first 48 hours
Straight away
Get the medical certificate of cause of death. If your parent died in hospital or a care home, staff arrange this. If they died at home unexpectedly, call emergency services first.
Within a few days
Register the death with your local register office. Most places require this within a few days.
At the same appointment
Order certified copies of the death certificate. Order more than feels sensible, because ten is normal and each organisation wants its own.
Once it is registered
Contact a funeral director, or check whether a plan was already paid for. Many people have one and never mention it.
Within thirty days
Secure the property. Lock it, redirect post, and if it is now empty, check what the home insurance says about unoccupied buildings, because many policies lapse after thirty days.
Why you need so many death certificates
Banks, pension providers, insurers, utilities and government departments will each want to see a certified copy, and most will not accept a photocopy or a scan. Some return them and some do not. Ordering ten at registration is far cheaper and faster than ordering them one at a time over the following six months.
This is the single most common thing people wish they had known, and it costs nothing to get right.
Who to tell in the first two weeks
Not everybody. Just the ones where delay causes a real problem.
5 things to do
Ticks are for this visit only. Nothing here is saved anywhere.
Where to look for the will
Start with the obvious places, because that is usually where it is: a home safe, a filing box, a bedside drawer. Then the less obvious. Many people leave a will with the solicitor who drafted it, and some countries have a central will register worth searching.
If you find a will, look for who is named as executor before you do anything else. That person has the legal authority to act, and if it is not you, several of the steps above become theirs rather than yours.
What can genuinely wait
Probate takes months in most places, and there is no version of this where you finish it in a fortnight. Closing accounts, valuing the estate, dealing with tax and distributing anything are all downstream of steps you have not yet completed.
Clearing the house can wait too, and most people who rush it regret it. Nothing bad happens if a wardrobe stays full until spring.
The part nobody warns you about
The hardest thing about this fortnight is rarely any single task. It is that you are trying to reconstruct somebody's entire administrative life from the outside, without a map, while grieving. Which bank. Which pension. Whether there was insurance. Whether the utilities were in their name. Who the solicitor was.
Most families find some of it and never find the rest. Money sits unclaimed, subscriptions keep taking payments for years, and somebody spends a Sunday going through paper looking for a policy number that may not exist.
It is worth saying plainly, because it is the thing you will think about later: this is not something you can fix now, for the person who has died. It is something you can fix for the next person, which is usually you.