You think you’ve thought of everything

…but it never ends.

When a person dies, the funeral home notifies the Social Security agency. This is good in that SS stops depositing money in your account so you don’t have to return overpayments. But here’s a thing we didn’t know: there’s a lot of gossip among government agencies and so on. It turns out that because SS was depositing funds to our bank account, the SS office notified that bank that one of the account holders had died.

So I got a letter from my friend Wells Fargo saying, We’ve been informed that your husband died. Sorry for your loss and all that, but please send us a copy of his death certificate and a self-addressed stamped envelope. And of course this made me cry because I wasn’t expecting a letter telling me that Randy is dead - I steel myself for any administrative conversation about his death and I try to spread them out so I don’t feel overwhelmed by sadness. I’ve learned to do this because there have been times when I’ve been talking with someone and they say, I’m sorry for your loss and I start to cry and sometimes I have to just give up and call back later.

Because we were cofounders of the WF accounts we had different usernames and passwords. I have all that info because Randy and I planned for this - as long as I had his usernames for everything I could change passwords and do whatever was necessary. Or so we thought. It turns out that once the bank had been reliably informed that Randy had died they shut down his online banking and I couldn’t get in to see which bills he was paying through the checking account. We had divided up the bills - he set up all the recurring payments and I paid all the one-offs, and now I can’t see which bills were set up as recurring payments.

So I started trying to track them down - what bills do we have that I’m not paying? Why do I not see them on our statements? Why the hell didn’t we take care of this before he died? I started with the mortgage - for some reason I get a paper statement for that one but I know Randy must have set it up as a recurring payment. DOES THAT MEAN THE MORTGAGE ISN’T BEING PAID? Fortunately, Randy has the mortgage holder’s website pinned to his browser and his login info is saved so I could go in and find out that no, the mortgage has not been paid and it’s about three weeks late. I made a one-time payment on their site and then went back to our WF account and set up the recurring payment, so that’s ONE BILL taken care of.

For months I have been replacing Randy’s email address with mine for account recovery for all the accounts I could find, but some I didn’t think of and some I probably don’t even know about. And some of this was delicate - Randy didn’t want to be coddled or to admit there were things he was no longer competent to do. And - the ever present refrain - we thought we had more time.

All of this is taking up a part of my brain that isn’t working particularly well - my sadness, my grief is so big that it sometimes overrides my ability to think in a rational way. It’s been just six weeks since he died and I feel like I need six months just to be able to rest and not think, not plan. But I don’t get six months - there are too many things that have to be taken care of right now. And every time I think I can see light at the end of the tunnel I stumble over another set of tasks, another phone call I have to make to tell someone my husband died and listen to them tell me they’re sorry for my loss. It’s excruciating.

And you know who I’d want to have commiserate about how hard this all is?