Well, I'm certainly going through the proper stages of grief, sometimes all at once, but mostly like a roller coaster, one will hit then switch off with another then back again so I often feel like I have emotional whiplash. Only thing I can compare it to is when I lost my grandma......it was as if my whole universe collapsed in on itself, my whole life centered around her, I just didn't have a clue how to function without her in it. With husband, it is similar, but worse as I have so many many other things I have to do and deal with as well.
I've decided husband was the King of procrastinators. Somehow he managed not to pay either 2008 and 2010 city taxes and school taxes......so he paid 2009?? but it didn't occur to him to pay or file 2008?? The not paying I could chalk up to not having the money. The not filing I don't understand as husband was anal when it came to taxes. It's not helping that we're finding paperwork in the most ridiculous places. sister in law cleaned out husband's kia so he can start fixing it to sell in order to get a somewhat decent price, his mom is wanting to buy it for his little bro and his wife. What does he find? Paperwork for not filing 2008, a w2 or two, and some other odds and end things. Including a car insurance notice of cancellation he never bothered to open. We have a whole stack for poor Travis......looks like we know where the poor kid's student loan refunds will be going until it's all paid.
Finally all of the monthly bills are paid up to current. That alone was a mess as they were scattered everywhere and it was impossible to tell those of which he'd paid and not paid.
I'm so angry with him over his chaotic non organization of important paperwork, I have to be careful or my blood pressure goes through the roof. I'm so furious over this tax thing..... I mean, ok, I totally get that some bills you just can't pay when the money isn't there so they have to be put aside. You can't get money out of a stone. But taxes?? OMG You don't do that with taxes anymore than you do that with the house payment! I can't believe he's done this with the taxes. And at some point I'm going to have to get Travis into his laptop and have him print out all the tax information he has on it because it's been done via computer for years. Because he was always so darn anal about taxes, and since when it's done via computer there is no reason for me to sign it, I never double checked them....like an idiot (obvious now how stupid that was) I assumed he was handling it.
It may sound somewhat crass, but I feel like I got left holding the bag.
So please make sure that if you're not the one who handles the bills ect, that you at least know where they're kept, what is and isn't paid and why, and that you're on every single bank acct. Nichole is correcting that with her and her husband on her way down here tomorrow.
Then I feel horrible so being so angry with him over the paperwork. And I'm angry at myself for not attempting to take over the job again once I was out of school.....but by then he was just getting the unemployment and SS and I didn't have access to either acct to pay the bills, so yeah. But from doing this paperwork, I'm not so sure I could've done much worse.
I miss him so much it hurts physically. And I have got to get his things out of here or put up because every time I see something of his.....especially an article of clothing or something, it's like having someone kick my legs out from under me. Yet as I bag his stuff, it makes me feel guilty, like I'm trying to wipe away his existence simply because I can't deal with it. I keep waiting for him to fuss at one of the dogs or Bruce. I've been avoiding the livingroom because every time I step in there I expect him to be sitting in his chair, and silly as it sounds, when he's not my heart drops through the floor and it hits me again.
I have guilt over the 3 days he was having symptoms of the heart attack and I didn't take him to the ER. I should've taken him, even if it was the GI and not the heart, I should've taken him. If I'd gotten him seen sooner maybe his heart wouldn't have been so severely damaged. Dammit, I'm a nurse, of all people I should've known better. To hell with the cost, the no insurance and all the rest, I should've taken him. I feel so bad I didn't spend more time with him once he came home. I keep thinking about all his symptoms once he came home from the hospital........and I think the dizziness and extreme fatigue should've tipped me off. I could've at least had him checked. And yeah I did check his discharge instructions and they said that nearly everything he had was "normal", I keep thinking that I should've known. But I swear that I had no red flag go up. Maybe it was because I was in denial about how really bad off he was, but I didn't get so much as a flitter. I was concerned about the excessive sleeping but when I checked the paperwork, it said it was normal and that he should rest whenever he got tired, which went with what they told me after mine. easy child even came over once to check his heart again to see if he'd went back into atrial fib again and nothing clicked with her. Only thing that stood out was how difficult it was to hear his heartbeat with her special cardiac stethoscope (which is more sensitive than the normal ones). But his color was good and he had no real complaints except the unusual arm thing.
And then there is the part of me that has a strong feeling the cardiologist knew that he didn't have long and let him come home to pass with family.
easy child and I both have guilt for not seeing him more at the hospital. I should've have just camped out at his bedside, they had a place for me to sleep. But I kept my head firmly planted in the sands of denial.....even when he was acting totally out of character at the hospital. And we should've been there when he was discharged instead of having Nichole bring him home, easy child and I know what questions to ask ect, and poor Nichole had her hands full with Aubrey and Oliver......and believed husband when he told her that they didn't have his medications at the hospital pharmacy and that for the 2 they did have he'd have had to wait more than an hour in the heat. (I found that paperwork last night, they were providing all medications except the bidil, which we got for him at walmart, so he had no reason to go without any.......except that he evidently was not all quite right in the head)
That I was so far in denial over his physical condition really upsets me. I'm not a stick your head in the sand sort of person by a long shot. But in hindsight that is obviously what I was doing because while I could repeat what the docs told us.......I just really didn't grasp what it meant in any real sense.
I know that hindsight is 20/20 and I'm only human, as is easy child, and we couldn't have known what the future held........intellectually I know all that. I know that even had I taken him in the first day he had symptoms that the end result could've have easily been the same, or worse, with long drawn out suffering involved. I know that if I took him back to the ER after he came home with his symptoms, they really wouldn't have been able to do anything..........And yet the guilt is still there because my heart doesn't want to listen to my head right now.
I just keep thinking that this is not the way it was supposed to be. What happened to those years that were supposed to be our golden years? I feel so cheated out of that.
So I guess I'm not handling things so well after all.
Poor easy child, she's had to handle all the paperwork. And she's been my buffer to some degree against the world as well as Nichole. Travis checks on me often. And I think how unfair that is because they're hurting too and feeling much of what I'm feeling. But we do talk often and none of us are afraid to talk about what we're feeling with each other, except perhaps katie, but even she's opened up some. My sis calls me every night. My poor mom doesn't know what to do so she keeps trying to give me money, which I keep telling her to keep as it's not going to help at this point. easy child's husband has been like a son, he can't help me enough. I feel bad because right at this moment he's out mowing my yard and he has to go to work in a half hour. I know it's therapeutic for them to help and it actually helps them. I've done it for enough people over the years. But still....
At least I supposed I can do the cleaning. Progress is slow, I keep going off on tangents then forgetting what I was doing......then come upon it later and can't remember having started the task. The cleaning helps me not have to think, which right now is a very good thing.
I worry about easy child, though. husband frustrated her to no end most of the time, and after a while, while she always treated him with respect and kindness ect......she drifted away from him, even convinced herself she didn't like him very much. She told me yesterday that she felt terrible that it took losing him for her to realize just how much she does love him.
I know this is normal, all of it. Lord knows I've dealt with grief enough over the years to know. It does help having somewhere to express it though...on a different level than what I do with the kids. And I thank you all for listening.