PAPERWORK (1)

I keep putting off doing any of the paperwork involved in the sorting out of mum's estate. Every time I think about sitting down and making a start on it, I seem to get overwhelmed by waves of both utter sadness and utter fear and, whilst I know that it all needs to be done, coupled with the fact that the gnawing pain of it not having been done is starting to make me feel sick to my stomach, means that somehow putting it off seems to be the only thing that I'm currently capable of.

When I got home one evening to find yet more mail addressed "c/o the Executors" and it turned out to be a bill for her care alarm button which I thought I'd paid last month and which seemed to have been invoiced through to a week after they'd collected the equipment and nearly a fortnight after her death, I will admit that my depression spiralled downwards pretty swiftly, especially as the office invoicing me had already closed for the day and that sick feeling in my stomach that I'd forgotten to do something important already, and before I'd even begun, was not going to go away overnight.

It's not as if paperwork is something I enjoy doing, although I'm sure that I'm not the only one who feels like that about it, and I might even go so far as to suggest that I'm fairly certain that is a pretty common feeling. I only have to open an envelope which requires me to do something about something, send something to someone, or complete as little as one page of questions, and my heart sinks like a stone as yet another wave of panic hits me full square in the pit of my churning stomach.

When it comes to the already huge-seeming mountain of envelopes regarding the Estate, everything I open and everything I touch seems to be demanding that eventually I will have to pay out huge sums of money that I don't have to people and bodies that I have never previously had any dealings with and demanding of me that I sign things and "take responsibility" for all manner of things which I imagine are going to financially bleed me dry even though I genuinely don't believe that they have anything to do with me.

My approach with such matters in my own life has always been to deal with it once and forget about it forever, which seldom seems to satisfy the strangely paperwork obsessives at things like insurance and pension companies, especially as they have danced their merry dance of corporate ownership over the past half decade or so, so it's pretty galling to have to go through it all in the aftermath of someone else's life, especially as that life is, sadly, no longer being lived.

But then, the prospect of dealing with mum's estate is pretty terrifying to me because there's so much that I could get wrong, so many pitfalls and traps into which I could hall, and so many things which I might possibly just forget to do, or, perhaps even worse, fail to know that I have to do, and every last one of them seems to want to financially penalise me for my own ignorance.

I do, after all, have to fill in reams of legalese so that probate can take place, and it seems to go on for pages, all of which seem to remind me of this fee or that fee, and that the hourly rate for various services charged seems to be about what I get for working an entire week, such were the benefits of a Law School education over an Art School one. Mind you, I'd never have been able to handle the paperwork if I'd made that other choice...

There is also a certain amount of urgency involved in attempting to put the flat onto the market, not least because my sister really does need to go home at some point, and the services to the place are beginning to be shut down as the contracts lose their regular monthly contributions.

Other files have revealed yet more paperwork which needs going through with a fine-tooth comb for things which may have been investments or insurance policies or pension plans, all of which may have been superceded by the merry dance that I mentioned, but all of which need checking into and, I expect, will demand more of the limited amount of official death certificates that will need requesting at a tenner a time...

Meanwhile, the month has turned and the next round of mum's Standing Orders and Direct Debits have become due and, no doubt, a whole raft of letters and demands will appear from various sources about which I'd forgotten, wondering where their payments are.

All of these things are distracting me from both getting refocussed upon my own work and preventing me from sleeping, as well as interfering with the natural process of just missing my mum which is, I fear, going to hit me like a sledgehammer any time now, even if it hasn't already done so and I hadn't yet realised it.

I have, however, with a lot of help from my Beloved, managed to drag myself up to the keyboard and make a start, so that, at the very least, two of the most urgent bills have been paid, even if it was out of my own bank balance which is already being stretched to breaking point. The Solicitor had said to me that the relatives shouldn't have to fork out a penny, and that all the creditors would have to wait for probate, but somehow it seemed wrong for mum to pay for the food at her own funeral, and a care bill that had slipped through the net back in April really needed to be paid, especially as I'd already promised mum that I'd "deal with it" during her last couple of weeks in hospital when it appeared, and was indeed going to sort it out on the very evening of the day I was summoned to the hospital to keep her company through her last afternoon.