Brutal Day

Some days are hard, others are just brutal.

Yesterday was our tax appointment. I had no illusions that it would be easy. Initally Chris was going by himself, usually he just drags papers back to me to sign. But plans changed, and I understood that he did not want to face this by himself.

The time came to go through papers. Normally we have everything laid out and organized, we primarily use our CPA because we have the misfortune of frequent tax audits. It went fairly smoothly until we got to the dependents area. Frank had to leave for a few minutes because we both started crying as Chris rummaged through the important papers box and found the thin envelope that is Perry's. It was incredibly difficult to pull out Perry's card and his death certificate. It is so final, his stay so brief to be contained in basically only one federal document. Next year he will not exist to them.

The would have and should haves eat your soul. We should have been thinking about a passport for future trips, real or imagined. We should have a new passport in our large manilla travel envelope, we should have already pulled it out once for our upcoming trip. It just makes it obvious that he will be missing on this trip, the irony being that we have the largest room we have ever had and no more people to use it... but there should be. It makes it obvious that he will always be missing until we reach our end here on earth.

We came back and lit a candle on the way home.

By 8:00, we were all exhausted.