Saturday, February 20, 2021

Grief: Death and Taxes

Note, for those of you wanting more frequent, day-to-day updates, I'm writing a "proof of life" post every Friday on Facebook, if you're inclined to brave that particular wilderness. It's more chatty, and talks about movies and TV shows a bit more than on here at the moment. You can follow me on FB and get the notification when I post, and hopefully being on FB to read it won't send you into an apoplexy. 

Tax Season normally fills people with dread and fear; not because everyone is secretly a white-collar criminal and living in fear that this year will be the one where the jig is suddenly up and that end up in federal prison; no, I think it’s just because most people don’t like to do math.

I don’t have a problem with paying taxes, per se. As soon as I figured out in my Economics class in high school that the taxes pay for stuff like roads, schools, national defense, yadda yadda yadda, I reasoned it was okay to expect us citizens to pay into the administrative costs of upkeep. I’ve only ever really groused about the exact percentages in each category.

What’s bothering me the most is having to go back through and relive my year, via purchases made, movies played, and that’s the trouble because I know exactly where I was from July to October and having to keep going over it again and again is a death of a thousand paper cuts. Cathy used to do this, the taxes. Oh, I’d help a little bit, with data entry and printing things out and looking at the uncategorized purchases to figure out what was what. But she did the heavy lifting. And when she got sick (well, sicker), pretty much the last thing on our minds was, “Now, don’t forget about the quarterly taxes. Here’s the password, and you’re going to want to...” I’d venture to say it was dead last at the bottom of the list of things we worried about.

So now I get to relive all of that.