When my mom died I called up Continental and politely explained the situation to them. I needed to book 5 tickets and the cost was well over $4k for the tickets since they were pretty much last minute. The very nice agent bent over backwards to help me and called in a couple of supervisors to get me the tickets at over half off.
My sister, on the other hand, was also trying to fly Continental and they wouldn’t do a thing to help her.
We were flying from two different cities and maybe that was the difference.