Credit card companies will TRY to saddle you with this kind of debt by the way - if ever a loved one dies and you are not co-signed on their credit card, do NOT agree to pay their debt unless you ask a lawyer first if you truly have to.
They will say “don’t you want them to go to the grave without debt”, they will try to guilt you, they will take advantage of your vulnerability.
Source: when my father died, he had some credit cards that my mom wasn’t on that she had no access to. The companies contacted her while she was sorting through the bills and getting a handle on how to run the house alone, badgering her with his credit card debt.
She wasn’t liable for any of it, but if she had ever agreed to pay before finding out that she didn’t need to, she would have been considered to have taken on his debt and would have HAD to pay it. It’s slimy, it’s predatory, and it’s entirely legal for them to do this.
Never accept the credit card company’s word about your obligation to pay anyone else’s debt, if you don’t have access to the card, ask a lawyer before agreeing to anything.
One thing that is going to sound silly but. If you want to do this as you're dying, REALLY make sure you're actually going to die.
I remember talking to someone who had been caring for HIV positive patients for years (decades, at that point), and they talked about the joy that came at first when their patients started living. But then those same patients were devastated to learn that because they had been living like they were going to die soon, their finances were ruined and they were at high risk of losing their homes, being in severe debt, etc. (on top of this, they also had to deal with the mental and physical aspects of actually living long-term after years of planning for death).
Which isn't their fault, of course- they had seen so many people die from it, they had every reason to think it WAS going to be rapidly fatal for them, and then...it wasn't. But it was a huge paradigm shift and some of them never financially recovered.
