This is not an argument against digital records. Digital records are searchable, duplicable at no cost, resistant to fire and flood, and can be in two countries at once. On almost every measure they are superior to paper, and any household treating paper as the primary medium for everything is making work for itself.
But there is one circumstance in which paper outperforms decisively, and it happens to be the circumstance these records exist for.
The authentication problem
A digital record is not available to a person. It is available to an authenticated session. Between the family and the information sits a mechanism that must be satisfied: a password, a device, a code sent somewhere, a recovery process, occasionally a support agent applying a policy written for fraud prevention rather than bereavement.
Every one of those is reasonable. Collectively they mean that at the moment of need, the family does not need the record — they need the record and the ability to prove entitlement to it, to an automated system, without the one person who could have proved it instantly.
Paper has no authentication layer. Possession is access. That is a genuine security weakness and, in the specific week after a death, it is the property that makes paper work when nothing else does.
What stress does to procedure
The second reason is about people rather than systems. Anyone who has dealt with a sudden death will recognise the cognitive state: functional, but narrowed. Short-term memory is unreliable. Multi-step procedures are difficult. Anything requiring a sequence of actions performed correctly in order is much harder than usual.
Digital retrieval is a multi-step procedure. Find the device, unlock it, locate the application, authenticate, navigate, interpret. Each step is trivial in ordinary conditions. In the week after a death, each is a place to stop.
A sheet of paper in a known location is one step. That is the whole design advantage, and it is enormous under load.
The dependency that is not obvious
There is a third problem, and it is the one households consistently miss. Digital records depend on services, and services have their own lifespans. Providers close, are acquired, change terms, or discontinue features. A file format becomes awkward. An account lapses because the card on it expired and the reminder went to an address nobody is reading.
None of this is hypothetical, and none of it announces itself. The household stores something important with a service, the service changes, and nobody learns of it until the day the record is needed — which is the day nobody is in a position to investigate.
Paper degrades slowly and visibly. Digital records fail suddenly and invisibly.
The sensible arrangement
Not a choice between the two. Digital for the body of the records: the detail, the documents, the material that benefits from being searchable and duplicated. Paper for the index — the single sheet that says what exists and where it is held, including where the digital material lives and how it is reached.
One page, printed, dated, in a location a family member can name without prompting. It is the least sophisticated artefact in the household's entire arrangement, and in the first week it is the one that is actually used.