A Smiling Young Widow

It’s a painful process to tackle all the admin that comes after losing a spouse. I have lots to rant about and lots to share. I’ve been forced to learn many new things, to gain expertise I wish I never needed to have.

I had been working on this post, thinking I could see a light at the end of the tunnel so it was a good time to share. Then I got a phone call that our rental property had a fire overnight. I was traveling with my parents and when I told them in the morning my dad said, “oh you had a dream about a fire at the townhouse.” Nope. Unfortunately this was not a dream. Everyone is just fine, so that’s most important. There’s a lot of damage to the house though, like months and months of restoration work ahead. Just like that I’m headed off on another venture of phone calls and emails, turning into an expert by learning other stuff I wish I never had to know. 

But I have a whole other perspective for sure. Would I prefer to not have this extra stress on my plate? Absolutely. It already has been a headache to deal with and that is going to continue for a while. At some point it’ll be fixed up and ideally insurance will cover all the cost. But even if hiccups come along the way, it’ll get sorted eventually. 

That’s been the mindset I’ve tried to adopt since Tom’s death. When you’ve been through the absolute worst of suddenly losing your husband, other things just really don’t seem as important. I’ll be careful to not paint too rosy a picture – it definitely can still takes work to get to that mindset. I also get overwhelmed much more easily than my old self and need to take breaks. 

Most things, despite what phone calls or letters or emails suggest, really don’t have a big rush on them. I have tried to just look at things when I can bear it. Return voicemails when I have the brain power for it. There’s so much emotion linked to all the admin. With the townhouse fire I’d be lying if I didn’t acknowledge the emotion there too. That’s the first house I bought, the first place Tom and I lived in together. Our homes hold so many memories.

This past year I sold “Tom’s house” too. We had already been planning to sell. Our renters moved out the day of Tom’s funeral – grrrreat timing (they left a mess and a bunch of their stuff behind despite knowing what had happened, makes you lose a little faith in people, but thankful for friends and my dad jumping in to help). Tom had always called me his property manager – he was the “land baron” (said with the typical pompous joking tone of Tom). I’d always been the one to handle everything with the rentals, it was just easier with him working out of town (and essentially never wanting to talk to people either!)

I had to call to cancel something on the house before selling. I tried to play it cool, like we’re all good but I just happen to be the one making this call as per usual. Just doing my property manager duties for the ol land baron. We get through to the point where we cancel, but I’m supposed to have some security code which of course I give a couple wrong guesses for (and I’m pretty sure Tom would’ve failed too). They were very kind about it actually, but said “Oh sorry we will need to talk to your husband himself, if you can please have him call in”. Uhhh shoot, busted. He’s dead. Oh it’s a different department. Oh good, another random person to tell my story too. 

I ended up doing a private sale of the house to the most wonderful and gracious young family.  It was so, so weird to sign everything on behalf of Tom’s estate. I had to get out of there fast when the family was so sweet to me as I handed over the keys. I had to disconnect from that situation as a bit of self-preservation, part of choosing who I let into my grief journey. I tend to struggle more to keep it together when people are being super nice to me, versus dealing with the really rude ones I’ve had to encounter. Then there’s the people who are just so neutral about it – I imagine it probably makes them super uncomfortable to deal with such a young widow.

I had to go into the bank to change Tom’s account into an estate account. I emailed in advance to describe the situation and figure out who I needed to talk with. Our meeting started out with talking about the weather. Then they were all matter of fact going through forms on the computer – one of the questions, “Did Thomas have a surviving spouse?”… “Umm yes? That’s me.” This was another time I had to disconnect from the situation. It was too weird to be in that meeting closing out my husband’s bank account. 

They sent an email two weeks after to let me know the process was complete for the account so I “could start going about settling the estate”… as if I had the slightest idea what that meant. Sifting through all kinds of forms and paperwork trying to wrap things up with Tom’s estate, I have had moments of just like is this really my life?! How did I have this amazing guy and marriage, but now here I am. I have an estate to wrap-up for my husband, our visions for the future obliterated into forms and conversations with strangers. This is a whole other level of WTF.

I have had to give myself grace throughout. I’m not myself. My old self was so on the ball and always organized. I’m functioning way below my baseline, yet I have needed to muddle through a lot of tasks with my grieving brain (more about that in this post). About a month after Tom died, I had to change his online banking password. I changed it to be the same as mine, easy. Then of course I forgot I’d done that, so the next time I tried to log-in I got locked out (Facepalm! It’s not exactly easy to unlock a dead guy’s account.) Or when I discovered in the fall that Tom’s truck had our previous year’s insurance and no current registration since that expired in May…oops I’d definitely been driving that around a bit. So yeah lots of this has not been exactly smooth.

There are emotions strung along with every piece of this admin too that compounds on top of the grieving brain challenges. Like anytime I have to talk to someone about transferring retirement savings, I’m forced to acknowledge again that I no longer get to live-out the life Tom and I planned. I have to come to terms with no longer having the dreams of what our retirement will look like together. (The weekend before Tom died we’d been talking about how we had to stay active so we could be the ones at the ski hill midweek in our retirement. Little and big things we had dreams about.)

It’s been painful having to fight with banks for RRSPs to be transferred to me (more to come on advice, but learn from us and check your beneficiaries are updated). In the earlier days I really struggled with these conversations and emails. Talking about transferring money into my accounts because Tom died felt horrible. I obviously don’t want the money, I want Tom. I came to terms with this a bit for myself – if you knew Tom you know how financially savvy he was, he was the guy dishing out advice on types of accounts over a beer. For his RRSPs to get cashed out and have a big chunk of that go to taxes, well that would be an insult to all his smart savings. I was willing to up my fight for him.

I didn’t realize quite how much I had to say about all the death admin, so I’m going to come back to do a “part 2” with advice I’d offer now. I don’t think any of this could ever possibly be easy, but I sure have learnt a lot along the way.