jdennyret - Welcome to Flyertalk.

I think that you would probably find the answer in the particular airline's forum. For example for Aadvantage, I would go to the American Airlines forum and perform a search (the function is in the upper right portion of the main page of the forum) using the word "deceased", you should find the answer in an "older" thread that the search finds. Different airlines have different rules. For example, NW doesn't allow transfer upon death of their miles, but this doesn't mean those miles are "lost" upon death if you know the deceased account number and password - just book an award for the living using that information. Unfortunately, miles that are insufficient for an award will be "lost".