6 Months of Grief Project: Day 32

Tax Blues

This is Day 32 of my #6MonthsOfGrief Project. To learn more about this practice, feel free to visit Day One, where I explain this project in more detail.

The Widow Paperwork never seems to end. I've accomplished so much, and yet there is still so much more to do. Now that I have successfully filed for Bankruptcy. I can face the next huge task - filing our 2015 taxes. Not only did my husband and I run our own businesses, but my husband's passing makes filing taxes a lot more complicated. And because he died so suddenly, I have been on a 7 month odyssey of finding all the receipts and paperwork needed to do the taxes for his business. As I've said before, my husband was one of the least organized people I have ever met and there seems to be absolutely no filing system whatsoever to his paperwork.

So today, I set up my turquoise, knitted power station, and I have been organizing and filing and sorting and crying, because inevitably, I find some precious love note, or drawing I made him, that he carefully tucked away in a disorganized box that also has parking tickets and utility bills in it as well. It's a brutal journey, but my desire to get this huge task done is currently stronger than my depressed frozen state. I'm trying to keep moving forward, no matter how impossible the tasks feel most of the time.

How do you motivate yourself to get tasks done, when you are deep in grief?

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I am very aware that this project can bring up a lot around yours or other's grief and loss, I will always follow every post with some online grief support resources that have helped me. Please feel free to let me know of online support that you have found healing in your grief, as well:

Art with Grief:

• Photographer [Sarah Treanor] Takes Moving Self-Portraits to Cope with Her Fiance's Death by Jillian Wong

• Self-Portraits: Expressing Emotion Through Art on What's Your Grief?

• The Hard Romance of Grief by Mark Liebenow

• The poetry of John O’Donohue

Resources for Widows:

• Camp Widow

• Soaring Spirits International

Living with Grief Resources:

• Grief Bibliography on Grief Healing

• Teresa “TL” Bruce's What to Say When Someone Dies
• They Brought Cookies: For A New Widow, Empathy Eases Death's Pain by Ann Finkbeiner on NPR
• A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

• Megan Devine’s Refuge in Grief

• The Geography of Sorrow: Francis Weller on Navigating Our Loses, interviewed by Tim McKee in Sun Magazine

• How to Be a Friend in Deed by Bruce Feiler in the New York Times

• 12 Things to Know About the First Year of Grieving Someone You Can’t Live Without by Laurie Costanza in Elephant Magazine

And remember, I am sharing this project on a variety of platforms, including my Instagram, Twitter, & Facebook feeds, as well as my Pinterest page on Grief. I use the hashtag #6MonthsOfGrief, so it can easily be found on any platform. Please share this project with anyone you think might need it.

Thank you, and see you tomorrow.