Triggers

 It's strange, what sets you off.

I decided to finally tackle the mountain of accounts.  I've got to do tax returns soon.  I'll have to do another "own your own business" one for myself, since I wrote the book in 2020 (and will get paid something this coming year for that), and also because I did some teaching this past year.  I'll have to go back a couple of years to bring forward some of the expenses, particularly for "business use of home."  So I need to be up to date on the household accounts for that.  And, of course, I'm going to have to do a final tax return for Gloria.  (Death and taxes, and all that.)

The household account are a year out of date.  We managed to catch up to the end of 2020, probably some time in April, so that I could do the 2020 taxes this past year.  But, after that, Gloria never felt up to a session of accounts.  So 2021 is sitting in a bunch of folders, sorted by month, but that's about it.  (I thought I'd lost the first week of 2021 in the move, but I think I've found them again.  Although some pieces don't seem to be there ...)  I haven't been looking forward to the enormity of the task, particularly with so many other competing demands on my time.

So, I girded up my loins, set out the account books, got out the accordion folder that Gloria keeps ... kept the current year's bills in, looked for (and didn't find) my coloured pens that I use to distinguish different kinds of entries in the books ... and started crying.  And kept crying for quite a long time.

We always did the accounts together.  Neither of us particularly liked doing accounts.  We did them in different, but complementary, ways.  I did a kind of general ledger, and Gloria did books of accounts.  We always did the accounts together.  And now I have to do them alone.

So, after a while I started sorting the folder where I found the slips from the first week of January, to make sure that nothing else was lost, and to check what was there.  And one of the things that was there was a scrap of paper with a postal code on it, because Gloria had wanted to write a formal thank you note for the friend of my mother's who had held a reception after my mother's memorial service, and I had looked up the postal code for her.  After my mother's memorial service, Gloria never felt well enough to get that done.  So I went to the box, which I knew I had here, where Gloria kept cards for emergencies such as this, and found a thank you card, and started to write out the thank you card ... and started crying again.

I'm crying as I'm writing this.  (I thought I had more boxes of Kleenex in stock.  They are probably in the storage locker in the basement ...)  I suspect it's going to be a crying day ...

Even the next day, as well as triggering over doing the accounts, there are a considerable number of triggers in the accounts.  Purdy's.  Gloria always insisted on getting Purdy's high quality chocolates for the grandkids at Easter, or for Halloween "gifts," or if we brought house gifts to a family party.  Always.  Well, I'm not going to be buying that anymore, am I?  (I don't even have to look for Ultra Fibre any more.)  The cheque for the yearly membership for the North Shore Needle Arts Guild.  Various candy charges in the groceries, because sometimes Gloria would suddenly want candy after dinner.  (And then, if I was stocking up to much in anticipation of when she would want candy again, she'd complain that I was buying too much ...)  The charges for my haircuts, because Zahir charged me double, because he didn't charge Gloria when he did her haircut, so that I wasn't coming into the work area during CoVID restrictions, even though I was always bringing Gloria for her haircuts.  Then there's sushi, which probably meant that Gloria didn't want much dinner that day, so I was augmenting my part of dinner with a little sushi, and the date is probably an indication that this, had we but known it, was an early warning of what was to come ...

And then there's Jacques Brel's "The Old Folks" ...

(Of course, for every Jacques Brel's "The Old Folks" there's also a Stan Rogers' "Mary Ellen Carter.")