Greetings from my Global Bedquarters. I’ll spend the next few hours here, trying to get out from under this stack of bills. My wonderful grief counselor shared a stunning statistic with our bereavement group a few weeks ago. We were all kvetching about how buried we often feel by the “business of death,” i.e. the payments to tax accountants and attorneys, the never-ending necessity of changing account numbers and car titles and home loans and credit cards (and don’t get me started on Amazon accounts and frequent flyer miles). Our counselor told us that research shows that when your spouse dies, the surviving spouse picks up one hundred additional tasks. Not for a week or two…forever. At first, I thought that number must be apocryphal...until I started adding up the extra tasks I’ve had to assume in the space of just a week, from bill paying to ordering my son’s tennis uniforms to car maintenance. I got to one hundred fast.
