Another private one.

Another private one.  The funeral home has already posted the obituary, so I'll be speaking freely soon.  I just wanted to let you all know how we are doing.

The last two days have been pretty terrible as far as emotions and workload go.  The emotions part is pretty self-explanatory.  Despite feeling relieved that he is no longer suffering FILs death is still a loss and a HUGE change.  Change is also scary and both mine and Shaun's anxiety has been through the roof.  These kinds of emotions are EXHAUSTING.  But that exhaustion did not negate the fact that we had to get a lot of things together for the funeral home and make sure that any valuables in the for-now empty (of people) house were secured.  Needless to say, we slept like rocks last night after two days of going so hard.

FILs house was clean and tidy except for dust and I wouldn't say that he was a hoarder, but OH MY GOSH, the amount of paperwork we had (and still have) to go through is INSANE.  We kept finding it everywhere.  We found (in two different places) 3 copies of stubs where he paid his life insurance premium, (but no contract), so we have no idea how much of the funeral cost that will cover.  I did call yesterday, but they won't give out the amount that the contract pays regardless of whether you have the account number or not.  I suppose that is a safe way to do things.

We searched for 2 days for the keys to the safe deposit box before we found them.  We thought that some of the things the funeral home needed might be in there so we didn't want to expend too much energy going through papers until we had that.  Turns out, there was only one helpful thing in it so we still had a lot of work to do.  We managed to get as much of it together as we could yesterday and went to the funeral home to make preparations.  I don't know if this would be considered a cop-out, but the funeral home director had looked up what Shaun's father chose for his mom, so we went with a matching casket and all that.  The only thing we did differently was the memorabilia thing which he didn't do for Shaun's mother (and later regretted).

We need to get some more photos to the funeral home, but other than that I think we've done what we can do.  The funeral is on Saturday because the pastor that FIL wanted has doctor appointments on Thursday and Friday.  That will give any out-of-town relatives time to get here, anyway.  We chose a graveside service unlike what Shaun's mother had due to COVID.  Maybe these older conservative types don't care about catching a virus, but we're not going to endanger them any more than is necessary.  Since he's a Veteran, there will be a 21 gun salute, which I've never seen IRL before, so that will be neat.

All in all I think that aside from the actual funeral we are past the hardest part.  The will left everything to Shaun since he is the only child so that is pretty straightforward, although both executors have passed away which might complicate things.  I think we'll probably end up needing to get a lawyer to help us navigate all of the upcoming paperwork, but I don't know.  This is uncharted territory for us.  I foresee a lot of paperwork and paperwork-sorting-through and phone calls in our near future.  Super fun times.  /sarcasm

Other than that I have basically neglected school for the last 3 weeks and I have an exam coming up on Tuesday.  I'm going to email my professor and ask if I can take my exam on the following Friday because an extra few days would help me a lot and I really need some time to catch up.  I've attended every online lecture, but I haven't done a lick of homework because of, well, everything.  I am hoping that she will have mercy on me.

The silver lining to all of this is that I am sure that Shaun and I can survive anything together.  We've been though a lot of hard things in our 12 years as a couple, but this is probably our biggest team-work type of challenge in all of that time.  We were pushed to our emotional edges and to physical exhaustion simultaneously over the last two days and aside from being just SLIGHTLY short with each other a few times, we've gotten a lot done and have propped each other up in a big way.  I never doubted us, but it feels nice to pass a test with flying colors.

P. S.

Death is going to happen to all of us.  After us finding paperwork everywhere and having to sort through it all, we 100% are going to make a "Shit, I Died" binder for the kids.  It's going to have all relevant paperwork and info for them so that we don't put them through more stress when we pass away.  I'm sure (or at least I hope) that most people have a filing cabinet or some type of organization system in place in their home, but if you do not, please, for the sake of your loved ones get it in some kind of order.  We didn't know the name of his life insurance company and still don't know how much of the funeral cost will be covered.  We don't know if he had more than one life insurance policy, or burial insurance, or the location of anything that would let us know.  We just have two boxes of mixed papers that we're going to have to sort through to make sure we don't miss anything helpful or important, and it should have been relatively easy for it not to be that way.  Please don't put your loved ones though more stress at a very hard time in life.  Please let your final act of love towards them be that you took care of them during your loss.