You think you hate taxes?

Taken on a good day trip on the way to Monterey. (The car is not real.)

Randy died April 7th and he had been in the hospital and then quickly failing once he got home, so we hadn’t gotten to the taxes. He had been taking the tax documents to his desk as they arrived in the mail but I wasn’t sure he was up to doing them so I took one document and put it on my desk so he wouldn’t be able to do them without me.

When Randy and I first married taxes were paper and pencil and I did them while he watched, and then we went over them together to make sure we agreed. Something about the process seemed difficult for him and I had always done my own taxes so we just continued on that way. In those days we owned nothing, took the standard deduction - two W2s and you’re done.

Later, when TurboTax came along and taxes were a computer thing, Randy did them by himself and we went over them together to make sure we agreed. By then we owned a home so there were more numbers to enter, but we still took the standard deduction and it was still two W2s and you’re done.

So the week after Randy died I sat down at the desk with his huge computer and tried to figure out Turbo Tax. My state of mind was bleak - it was all I could do to even turn on the computer. I couldn’t tell if Randy had already begun a return for the year, so I started one and pulled together all the tax paperwork. There was my simple W2, a W2 from Randy’s employer, some kind of confusing addendum to the W2 that was long term disability payments that came from his employer’s insurance carrier, and a form for Social Security disability payments.

So I was immediately stumped by the addendum - that’s not a W2, right? And the payment is coming from an insurance company, but is it really employer payment THROUGH the insurance company? And the social security payments are disability, not retirement, right? So is that treated differently?

I stumbled through the process and when I got to the end the program told me in order to file electronically I would need our adjusted gross income from the previous year. That’s when I discovered that for all previous years Randy had filed all the documents but hadn’t printed out the final return. To find the previous year’s return I had to search Turbo Tax and I ended up with some kind of keychain issue. Heaven only knows what I was doing wrong because the whole time I was working on the return there was a drumbeat in my head: Who cares? What difference does it make? What difference does anything make? My husband is DEAD.

By this time I had missed the deadline, but fortunately California had an extension because of snow and floods and so on. I wasn’t affected by any of that, but whatever. So I put all my little papers in a folder and took them to a pop-up tax person and explained the situation, telling her that my husband had died. She went through them, then looked up at me and said, This is pretty simple. I just nodded my head. She started writing down my information and when she got to date of death I said, April 7. She looked up at me again and said, THIS April 7? I nodded again and said, I know it’s really simple, but maybe not this year.

I made it back to the car without crying, but I’m puddling up as I write this because that’s just going to keep happening for the rest of my life. Someone will ask about my husband and I will have to say, He died - I’m a widow.