Run the first call
before you have to make it.

How it was researched

Researched and written September 13 and 14, 2026. Every statute, agency page, and report cited was opened during that work and read against the sentence it supports. The BLS figures come from the March 2025 all-data workbook inside the Employee Benefits in the United States ZIP (released September 25, 2025), rows for access to paid funeral leave; the summary sheet lists funeral leave as provision 345. The Empathy figures come from the Grief Tax landing page and the 2025 report PDF; the report says it surveyed bereaved people across the United States and doesn't state a sample size, so we report its numbers as its numbers. The Oregon text was read on the legislature's ORS chapter 659A page; California on leginfo; Illinois on the Department of Labor's act page and FAQ, because the General Assembly's statute site returned errors on every attempt; Vermont on the Department of Labor's Act 32 page, because the legislature's statute site couldn't be reached; the COBRA regulations on Cornell's Legal Information Institute, because eCFR redirected to a block page, with the Department of Labor's 2021 employer guide read directly. Pages that refused to load (Justia, the Colorado labor department's sick-leave page) weren't cited. A second, independent claim-versus-source pass on September 14, 2026 re-opened all 21 sources and read each against every sentence that cites it: the BLS workbooks were read from the ZIP linked on the publication page (the BLS server refuses command-line downloads, so the archive was fetched through a browser-style client), the Grief Tax PDF was read in full, and the program and pricing facts in the last section were read on the live mortl.com employer page. Where the wording of the draft went past what a source states, the sentence was cut back to the source's wording. No quote, statistic, reader, company, or personal experience in this book is invented; the scenarios are constructed from roles, and the scripts are MORTL's own suggested wording. A third, adversarial pass on September 14, 2026 tried to refute the book's twelve most consequential claims and every row of the state table against the live sources: the BLS all-data workbook was opened from the ZIP (60, 56, 42, and 23 percent read from the funeral leave rows), the Grief Tax PDF was read in full, the Oregon sections were read in the statute text on the legislature's page rather than from a summary, and the COBRA, IRS, FMLA, and state pages were re-read line by line. The only change it produced was to the sentence describing the Grief Tax chart, which now names the chart's own title.

This book isn't legal advice, and the state table is a floor read on one day. It covers the five state bereavement mandates and two sick-leave laws we read; it doesn't cover city ordinances (several set their own sick-leave rules), collective bargaining agreements, public-sector rules, or states that have added bereavement language since September 2026. It doesn't list state final-pay deadlines for a deceased employee, which vary and which your payroll provider or employment counsel should confirm. The COBRA deadlines apply to private-sector plans of employers with 20 or more employees ; smaller employers may be under a state continuation law this book doesn't cover. Medical aid in dying isn't suicide, and nothing in the suicide callout applies to it. The drill finds gaps; closing the legal ones in a state where you have employees may need an employment lawyer.

21 sources, each read on the date shown in the book.