105 days and counting

It’s been 3 months since she died. A lot has changed, and in other ways, not so much.

Honestly, the house looks pretty much like it did before we left to take her to the hospital back in February when this all started. The bedroom is pretty much the same mess it always has been, her clothing on one side of the room, mine on the other. Her closet is untouched, of course, as is her dresser. Since I never had a dresser (small room, among other reasons), my clothing is in a (clean) pile on a side table, the rest divided between two laundry baskets.

Downstairs, her computer is still next to mine. Her cellphone is in the new filing cabinet, along with the important papers I moved there a couple of months ago, after dealing with the taxes. In the addition of the house, the table where we mostly ate is covered with mail, papers and assorted things, since now I take my meals in the dining room. Just seems like a better idea, and that’s what the room was for anyway. That, and it’s a little surreal to eat my meals where the two of us did for nearly 30 years. Just a constant reminder that she’s no longer here. And I already have enough of that, thanks.

I’m still working full-time, and I’ve only been able to take a little time off, but I’m hoping to take some more in a couple of months. I have one pressing medical issue that I need to take care of: an umbilical hernia that was diagnosed before all of this began. I check the area every couple of days, since I do strenuous work at my employment. The surgeon said that it would never get better on its own, so if I was going to put off the surgery, I needed to be aware of any changes in that area. So far, so good. I just don’t have the time right now to be laid up for a couple of months while a surgery heals.

I’m still dealing with the estate. Initially, it was a whirlwind of things that needed to be taken care of pretty much all at once. Funeral, bills, talking to her various doctors and financial people, closing accounts, monitoring others, and making sure the ones that weren’t being closed were aware that someone else was now paying the bills and not to close the account because of that change. The house is in both our names, so that transfer was seamless. The basic checking and savings accounts were joint as well, so I didn’t have to be concerned about being left without the means to do all this. Even if that had occurred, I’ve always had a separate account that I kept in case of emergency. This situation would fit into that pigeonhole.

The only thing that really ended up being a problem was a lack of a will. Over the years, we made several attempts to create one, but were always bogged down by the details. Who to leave money to, who to appoint as executor (obviously, initially it would be each other, but if we both died together, we’d be kind of stuck on who the next person would be), and then what to do with various parts of the estate. My bugaboo was what to do about the computers and their sensitive information. The lawyer we contacted about a will didn’t have much experience with that, so it was left to me to get her the information. Of course, we never did, so we ended up without a will. This became an immediate problem when she passed. Certain parts of the estate would transfer to a spouse, but others don’t necessarily, so I had to secure the services of a lawyer. We filed for probate, listed the assets that needed to be addressed, and, fortunately, we live in a smaller county, so the courts weren’t overwhelmed. It took only about six weeks to finalize, and I was appointed executor of her estate last week.

I haven’t had much time to deal with everything in the house. Well-meaning people tell me, “You have time, don’t rush things,” but it’s not a huge house, so a lot of the space is taken up with her things. Especially her clothes. Like our parents before us, both of us are/were pack rats. We squirreled away things that we might use once and then probably never touch again. And we constantly came across items that made us say, “When did we get this?” and “I wasn’t even aware we had one of these!” and so on. For example, in the last couple of years, she was doing business with an arm of Amazon called Vine, and how it worked was, you ordered items, reviewed them, but as you were reviewing, you didn’t have to pay for the items, but you had to hold onto them for a set period before you could dispose of them through donation, reselling and so on. The only problem was that she never pulled the trigger on the last part. Most items went into a storage tote, as intended, but she never bothered. Or said she’d sell it on eBay or some other site, but again, that never happened. So we ended up with piles of products that we had zero use for, and they just took up more space in the already overstuffed house.

And then there are the storage units. When I sold and moved out of my childhood home, I put the items I wanted to keep in storage. And when I moved here, those items came along and were stored. Over the past 35 years, I’ve moved those items three times to new storage units near where we lived. When we sold her parents’ house just after the turn of the century, the items she wanted to keep were also stored. And we’ve been paying for those storage units the whole time. A quick tally of the fees comes to about $60,000 USD, which would easily be the value of a really nice vehicle or a house, depending on its size. Consequently, given the current situation, those units definitely need to be opened, reviewed, and addressed. Especially in her case, I honestly have zero idea what’s there, so I do need to take care of that while I’m still physically able. And having lived without the items for going on 40 years, it’s pretty clear they’re kept mostly for sentimental reasons.

All in all, it’s not what I envisioned to be doing in ’26. I still visit her at least once every 10 days or so. I’m not sure I could do it daily, or even several times a week, as some people do. When she was still alive, and we talked about death and the aftermath, she was pretty adamant that she didn’t want me visiting her a great deal, because as she said, “I’m not really there, just my body will be”. Which is true, and her parents are buried nearby, and she hardly ever visited them either. More often than not, when we passed by the cemetery on the way to one thing or another, I suggested we visit the grave, and she adamantly refused for the reason above. Every now and again, I’d take us there, she’d stay in the car, and I’d go have a chat with her parents. Just say a few words of encouragement, and mention that I loved them and their daughter. Climb back in the car and be on our way.

Soon it will be six months. Then a year. Visiting in winter is a little more difficult, but not impossible, now that I have the Colorado. The cemetery manager said they wouldn’t install the headstone base until at least 6 months after the burial, so I still have plenty of time to order it. Since it’s a Catholic cemetery, there are restrictions on what can go on the headstone, so I may have to be a little creative to properly honor her with what she liked and who she was. In the interim, I purchased a temporary granite stone from a shop on Amazon, and with permission, installed it about 3 weeks ago.

And…it’s been several days since I started this post. Time to put it to bed as well. As I told a friend recently, I will be writing more, just not on a set schedule. Writing is cathartic, and it helps remind me of things I want to share and say. So be on the lookout for more here in the near future.