Nobody Tells You About the Paperwork

Nobody Tells You About the Paperwork

They tell you about the funeral. They tell you about the grief, the tears, the hard first year. Nobody sits you down and says: within a few weeks, you're going to be handed a stack of forms, and every single one of them is going to ask you to remove your husband's name from something.

The car titles. The bank accounts. The insurance policies. And here's the thing nobody warns you about: it doesn't feel like paperwork. It feels like erasing him.

I lost Tom's voice by accident, in the middle of doing something practical. He used his cell phone for work, and in the days before the funeral, we had to record a generic outgoing message so his clients would know to expect a delay. A neighbor helped, recording right over his greeting — nobody was thinking, in that moment, about what we were recording over. The messages he'd left on my own phone disappeared too, quietly, the way phones clear out old voicemails on their own.

Then came the death certificate — the one document every other piece of paperwork depended on — and being asked, in the middle of the wake itself, to settle the funeral bill before it would be released. Grief does not get to pause commerce, even in the room where you're saying goodbye.

And then came the DMV. Standing in that line, tapping my leg, hoping the woman behind the counter wouldn't look at me too closely, because if she did, the floodgates were going to open. Doing this enormous thing — erasing my husband's name from every title we owned — while everyone else around me was just annoyed at the wait. Wondering: does anybody know what I'm actually doing right now?

Someone did, as it turned out — in a way I never expected. I'll let you hear that part in the episode itself.

But I want to end with what we didn't lose. Tom's phone was still connected to our car's Bluetooth system, and in a moment of pure, ordinary exasperation with our sons, he'd once recorded his own name into the settings: "Pain in my ass." We never touched it. It's still there. And it still makes us laugh — a real laugh, not a bittersweet one — every single time.

Not everything has to be erased. Some things you get to keep on purpose.

Listen to the full episode: "Pain in My A… Well, What We Didn't Erase" — Episode 7 of Mosaic: Beauty in Every Broken Piece.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/2SGdmAJdFbqieW7r1oGBES?si=JmtHOVXLSSOYE10hDI8uiw

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-we-didnt-erase/id6784076332?i=1000782879136