Bureaucracy
I'm sitting here sorting through the pile of mail that's accumulated over the past few months while I was too busy grieving to deal with it. Now I know why there was constantly a huge pile of mail on the table when I was twelve; Marie-Jeanne must have been swamped with a similar pile of Stuff Demanding Her Attention after Russell died, plus the extra fun of trying to raise a kid who was falling into his own pit of grief, and of scrambling to figure out how she could get some kind of Day Job to keep things together. I know Elmina (Russel's mother) passed us some major chunks of the money Clayton (Russell's father) had managed to get by some lucky investments. Which I am still mostly living on, to be honest.
And I'm just contemplating all these bureaucracies spinning away, generating all these little notifications. Banks and insurance companies sending me a new letter every so often with an update on my or my mothers' accounts. A retirement fund that I guess doesn't know Mom's died yet asking her to vote on the now-passed board election. A note from her doctor reminding her that it's time for her yearly appointment, the month after she died. A few lingering debts that I missed dealing with when she died that are still sending collection notices. Eventually I'll get all of this covered, and my mailbox will go back to its usual slow rhythm of credit card offers and the very occasional note from a human.
I'm sorting through all of these because I'm plucking out all the tax stuff to send off to my mom's accountant. Along with my tax stuff because I just can't deal with it right now. If ever to be honest, I should just start paying someone to do the dirty work of sorting through all the forms and entering the numbers for me. Think I'm gonna finally go talk to the bank about setting up a business credit card, too, so I can quickly and easily say “I lost this much on my business this year” and get tax deductions for that.
Anyway. Vast bureaucratic machines, running at the slow time of snailmail. They'll wait patiently for me to bother dealing with them.
Originally published at Egypt Urnash. You can comment here or there.