6 Months of Grief Project: Day 36

Tax Hag Saint

This is Day 36 of my #6MonthsOfGrief Project. To learn more about this practice, feel free to visit Day One, where I explain this project in more detail.

Today I finally finished and filed our taxes. This process took me days, but ironically, it went a lot faster than when my husband was alive, because he was always so difficult around money issues. Every year it would be like pulling teeth, trying to get him to give me his receipts and god forbid he would use any kind of organizational system I might set up for him! Even the suggestion would send him into a flying rage. I now know that he was so angry and difficult during tax time, because he was hiding a major debt from me. We did find some healing around his chronic debting, mere weeks before he passed away, for which I will always be grateful.

Since he passed away, I've spent months going through all his business paperwork, organizing it and putting it into sensible categories and folders. It was still a brutal process, but at least I could put my hands on all the paperwork I needed, relatively easily.

I feel like a haggard saint, and I drew a self-portrait in my journal as I waited for everything to upload to the IRS. This image makes me laugh, because those eyes really capture how frazzled but relieved I feel at this moment. Now I'm going to drink some wine...

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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
• When the Fall Comes, a film about Grief by Adriana Marchione
• 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:

• Modern Loss's excellent resource list
• 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.