In the days before my dad died, the hospital was already asking me to make major financial decisions. What funeral home or crematorium do you want to use? Do you really want the basic package? Was your beloved father basic? Funeral homes aren't even required to list prices on their websites — though that may be changing thanks to the Federal Trade Commission. While Dad was on his deathbed, I was Googling customer reviews and checking my credit card limit.

Since then, my life has been consumed by settling my parents' estate. Executor and Successor Trustee is my new part-time job — one I never asked for, and one I'm technically not being paid to do, though I suppose the inheritance counts. Over the past few months, I've learned about death certificates (you will need an absurd number of copies), the difference between having something notarized and getting a Medallion Signature Guarantee (the latter is essentially a fancier version of the former), and how you should respond when your dead parent receives a jury summons (depends on the state, but you usually have to contact the County Clerk to have the aforementioned dead parent removed from their lists). I've had to sell a condo, a boat and a car. Real estate: every Millennial's expertise!

On top of the complicated stuff that might get me in trouble with the law if I mess up, there's also the weird, sad stuff. In their Florida condo, my mom had 34 decorative fish. What am I supposed to do with those? What's the best way to transfer my dad's ashes from the basic urn to the nicer, Frank Lloyd Wright-esque urn I purchased for his eternal rest? The answer, as it turns out, is a Solo cup.

And then there's the memorial, which is like planning a depressing wedding, both in logistics and in cost. According to the National Funeral Directors Association, the average cost of a funeral in 2021 was $7,848 — a little less if the guest of honor is cremated. But that's what the life insurance money is for, right? Assuming your parents had a life insurance policy.

Fortunately, ours did — a few, in fact. We held my mom's memorial at a local bar-restaurant and catered it with her favorite pizza. We held my dad's at the golf course near our childhood home — he designed the clubhouse. It was easier the second time around: we already had easels to display the pictures, and we were able to import the invites from Mom's big day over to Dad's.

No one is truly prepared for their parents to die. When I asked my aunts and uncles and friends' parents for advice, they didn't have much to spare—all they could remember was the horrible grief of it. And many of them had hired lawyers and accountants to deal with the bureaucracy for them; unlike my generation, their generation had already built the financial security to afford such luxuries.

In Boomers' defense, those luxuries can sometimes become necessities. Though my dad had a living trust — which should have saved my sister and me from probate court — he failed to update one life insurance policy, so it does have to go through probate, and we've hired a lawyer in Florida accordingly. We'll be more than able to cover her fees with the money we're paying her to get for us.

But I'd argue that Millennials are particularly ill-equipped to navigate the obstacle course of estate law. I'm extraordinarily privileged in that I have no student loans to pay off and my parents weren't carrying loads of debt. The vast majority of my friends — and the vast majority of my generation — are not in my position. Many Millennials are barely scraping by as it is. And while for some of them, an inheritance may help, for others there will be no inheritance — only more creditors to deal with.

Even as a privileged Millennial, this process is by no means easy. Every day, whether I'm trying to untangle my parents' TD Ameritrade account (how does the stock market work?) or correct my dad's death certificate (did you know a death certificate can be wrong?), I'm confronted with the reality that I have no idea what I'm doing. It's terrifying.

Death wasn't a taboo in our household, but it wasn't a common dinner table conversation, either. I knew both my parents wanted to be cremated. My mom sometimes joked that we should "just shoot her" if she became very ill, and though my dad had plenty of guns (which I also had to figure out how to sell), none of us wanted to call her bluff during her last days. After I broke the news that he wasn't going to get out of the hospital this time, my dad told me the name of his lawyer. "He won't screw you," were his exact words.

I wish death had been a common dinner table conversation. Money, too. Don't spend more than you have is about the extent of my financial literacy. I wish my parents had talked to me about their assets instead of leaving me a cardboard box full of paperwork to comb through next to the Christmas decorations. At least I'm old enough to know how a checkbook works.

People keep telling me how sad it is that I lost both parents at such a young age. Here's what I want to tell them: I'm at the bottom of a bell curve. The Boomers are starting to die — my parents just went early. Over the next decade or two, more and more of my peers are going to join the dead parents club. The time to get cozy with the Grim Reaper is now, before he comes uninvited.

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Pew Research Center has labeled Millennials as those born between 1981 and 1996; Gen X as those born between 1965 and 1980; the Baby Boom generation as those born between 1946 and 1965, and the Silent Generation as those born between 1928 and 1945. People born after 1996 are considered “Post-Millennial.” Some market research agencies and media outlets have alternately deemed the generation after Millennials “iGeneration” or “Digital Natives,” though cultural litigation over their generational designation may take years to definitively settle. Recall that Millennials were, during the 1990s and into the 2000s, often called “Generation Y,” as a Newsweek story from 2000 attests.

Nearly half of Millennial registered voters — around 44 percent — describe themselves as independents, Pew Research Center found. “However, a majority of Millennials (59 percent) affiliate with the Democratic Party,” the report adds, noting that “just 32 percent identify as Republicans or lean toward the GOP.” This is a sharp divergence from older generations whose political identification is more equal across partisan lines. Only the Silent Generation lean more Republican than Democrat.

Some hopeful news: “Millennials’ early interest in this year’s midterms is greater than for the past two congressional elections,” the survey reports. “This year, 62 percent of Millennial registered voters say they are looking forward to the midterms; at similar points in 2014 and 2010, fewer Millennials said they were looking forward to the elections (46 percent in 2014, 39 percent in 2010).”

Millennials’ party identification as discussed above generally reflects who they plan to vote for in the midterm elections later this year, with 62 percent of Millennials saying they’d vote for the Democrat in their district. While Pew Research Center says Millennial voters usually favor Democrats during midterms, they do so by wider margins this time around. For older generations, not much has changed from past midterms in terms of who they’d vote for or the amount of early interest in the elections.

When it comes to Trump, Millennials are disproportionately not happy with the president’s performance compared to older generations. Nearly two-thirds of Millennials (65 percent) disapprove and just 27 percent approve of his time in office. For Gen-Xers, Trump’s disapproval number drops to 57 percent; 51 percent of Boomers disapprove and 48 percent of the Silent generation disapprove.

Before Trump was elected president, there was a lot of talk about how Millennials were more liberal and progressive than past generations. While Hillary Clinton did win the Millennial vote, Trump still won about one-third of young voters, which was higher than pre-election polls and popular discourse suggested. So while this information from Pew Research Center  — that young voters lean Democrat —doesn’t come off as particularly novel, with midterm elections on the horizon, it is unclear how the chips will fall.

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