If you find yourself unexpectedly weeping during your tax preparation, it may be more than your financial woes.
Something I hadn’t considered when I was struggling after my mom’s death was that her taxes would still need to be filed the following year.
So, just a few months after I’d survived my first Christmas without her, I found myself knee-deep in all the receipts that were often-painful reminders of our journey the year before.
Dates brought back vivid memories of how Mom was doing during a certain period, when her health started to decline, and the limited time she had left - of which I wasn’t always aware.
As I was organizing her paperwork, I’d find myself gazing at a receipt and thinking of specific symptoms she had or how long she lived after a certain date.
That first year was so painful, and my memories so fresh, that the last thing I wanted to do was go through a pile of receipts to remind me of all we’d been through in the last months of Mom’s life.
Photo by Joao Viegas on Unsplash