My grandmother died in August 2019. She was one of the most important people in our lives, and all I cared about in that moment was giving her a beautiful send-off, the dignified goodbye she had earned across a lifetime. That is not what happened.
Within days, the grief was buried under something colder. One relative left with the entire estate. The rest of the family got nothing, 8 children, 50 grandchildren, 12 great-grandchildren. Around £185,000, gone, and with it any sense of fairness, trust or peace. There was no clear will anyone could act on, no agreed instructions, no single trusted place where her wishes lived, everything had been destroyed or changed unknowingly. Just silence, suspicion, and a family turning on itself at the exact moment it should have been holding each other up.
A woman who deserved a graceful, beautiful funeral was instead let down as the family around her was consumed by grief, arguments and financial strain. They were fighting over paperwork and access while we were still trying to understand that she was gone. The administration after a death, the locked accounts, the missing documents, the probate delays, the questions no one could answer, the court case, took something away from a genuine goodbye for a whole family.
Watch people. Don’t let anybody thief what is yours.
I grew up in a traditional Caribbean family, in a close-knit Black community where everybody knew everybody. The older generation passed down stories, warnings and lessons as naturally as recipes and Sunday conversations. When inheritance and family property came up, the conversation rarely started with building wealth or estate planning. It started with a warning: watch people, don’t let anybody thief what is yours, people will smile with you and take everything when the person dead.
Those sentences are not random. They come from history, migration, land disputes and family fractures, from a long memory of mistrust shaped by colonisation, fear and theft. For years I thought they were just old sayings. Then I lived one. I watched the exact thing my elders warned about happen to my own family, in real time, over my own grandmother.
From one family’s loss to a mission
In 2025, after seeing this same pattern play out again and again over the years, in my family and in others, I finally put a name to the idea. I spoke to my brother, Kieron Newman, who lived the same reality I did and felt the same anger and helplessness. He became Solemn’s CTO. In 2026 we began building Solemn, the secure digital legacy and estate planning infrastructure I wish my family had.
Solemn protects what matters most when someone dies. Your will, your documents, your messages, your account details and the financial support you set aside, all held in one encrypted place, released only to the guardians you choose, only when a death is verified, with every release logged and audited. No relative disappearing with the estate. No family left with nothing. No beautiful send-off lost to chaos. Just clarity, fairness and protection at the moment families are least able to cope.