Bureaucracy has been a core sociological concern since the discipline's inception. While sociologists have explored the impact of bureaucracy on many areas of social life (from work to immigration policy), less is known about how bereaved individuals navigate the bureaucracy of death. After a loved one dies a range of time-consuming and time-sensitive hidden bureaucratic tasks must be completed - such as notifying officials and managing the estate - across public, private and third sector organisations. How do individuals experience and navigate such bureaucracy at a time of extreme sadness and vulnerability? Drawing on data from a qualitative study on death administration, this article explores people's encounters with bureaucratic processes after bereavement. The article illuminates the challenging nature and ultimate failure of bureaucratic procedures in death administration. Such procedures create insensitivity around issues of personhood, often compounding emotional distress and vulnerability. Our analysis illuminates the ways in which this can lead to the operation of bureaucratic violence, a specific type of domination in which citizen subjectivities are affected by abstract rules and hostile organisational structures. By shedding light on death administration processes the article extends sociological understandings of bureaucracy and offers an innovative contribution to literature on grief.