Here is a sad tale and warning it might be long. I had a cousin who lived in San Franciso and he lived there for reasons of his sexuality. He had never been married. He did have a couple of different live in partners over the years. His last partner had only been with him a year or two to the best of my knowledge.
Around Sept. -Oct 2019 he passed away. No will, no known relatives close or keeping tabs on him. He was in communication with various relatives but not on an ongoing basis. Needless to say, no one knew about this until summer of 2020. (Think Covid 19) No one was free and able to travel to CA to take care of things. Probably our first mistake. At any rate, an acquaintance of his stepped up to be the executor of the estate. A lawyer was selected by word of mouth.
Then the circus started. A full blown relative search was begun. He had no children, siblings or parents. So by law, the estate was to go to his parents siblings and their offspring if the parents were no longer in existence. There were two parent siblings still around. The list of people of eligible benefactors was pretty long and took a long time to assemble. My father was one of two existing parent siblings still around. He was and is in a Nursing home. It is hard to watch your parents fade away in these places but it is what it is. Thats a different story. We did not want to bother him with all the legal stuff and one of my siblings is his legal guardian so they were our point of contact with the legal process. One of the deceased man's parents came from a Reservation. This complicated the search process a little. I cant imagine how difficult this is to accomplish, let alone in a Covid environment. The court system in CA was not on a full time schedule and that delayed things as well. The list of benefactor's was eventually established. By that time, my fathers sibling has passed away which meant another delay to change things around. People on the list would call for questions or ask by email and that would generate more lawyer time and new copies of all the happenings to all of the benefactors at a rate of $5 a page. (Think multiple copies to multiple people, each time the whole thing was copied from the beginning) . The benefactors would try to take out loans on their expected benefits which would lead to their loan companies asking to be involved in the benefits which would lead to more lawyer and court time, more copies and furtherance of delays.
There were some problems with the estate as the deceased had not payed income taxes in many years. He had some personal property and real estate that needed to be liquidated. All these things add up to delays.
In the end, everything was completed and finished. The executor of the state wanted to be listed as a prime benefactor, this was denied but he got the executor rate. The lawyer asked for extra pay due to the complexity of it all. It was late summer 2023 before this was all finished up.
My father ended up getting a share of the money that will help keep his bills in the Nursing home at bay for a short period of time. IF there is any lesson in this, it is simply to get the will done at least. So many of these things could have been avoided with a simple document.
To the OP, sorry to hear of your loss.
