How Filing My Deceased Mom’s Taxes (Twice) Helped Me Grieve Her Loss
Each filing gave me a new perspective on what “life after all the paperwork” really means
Filing your taxes when you’re dead isn’t that different from filing them when you’re alive — you just can’t sign your own forms. As my mom’s only child and caregiver, signing her income tax forms after she died was what brought me, reluctantly, to a fading mall for an appointment at H&R Block to dwell on money my mom could no longer enjoy nor fret over signing away.
Again.
People die once, my mother included. But since she died unexpectedly just before filing her taxes for the prior year, she left the errand twice undone. After she died, it was up to me to file them for the year before her death and for the year she actually died. One death, two tax appointments one year apart, two chances for me to see the story of my mother’s final months told by the IRS in the language of numbers, in acts divided into tax seasons.
“Edith Tompkins,” the receptionist called out into the bland office abyss. I stood, even though this was my mother’s name. The computer carried her name over automatically each year, just one more mechanical prod from the government’s giant adding machine, sucking the paperwork into one side and spitting it back out the other with a final score, catching my heart in the gears for good measure.
The tax-collection apparatus hadn’t let me book the same preparer for the second year, as though preparers were interchangeable cogs. But I had liked the previous year’s cog. He had kept the conversation sparse and let me supply information robotically, allowing me to embrace the lifeless space of income taxes and ignore my vital suffering. I’d left feeling cared for, as sometimes happens when people just leave you alone.
My new preparer, Antonietta, greeted me with a warm smile and escorted me back to the cubicle where I would need to explain my situation all over again. Couldn’t I just pretend to be my mother instead? I certainly could have pulled it off.
Her dementia diagnosis had triggered my reverse-parenting frenzy to get a handle on her finances, medications, medical care, safety, and a house stuffed with fifty-plus years of precious possessions. I’d absorbed her identity in the process, and when she died it was like having a person yanked out of me. No, I wouldn’t pose as my mom. I would just keep the conversation to a minimum like last year.
Unfortunately, unlike the past year’s dear robo-preparer, Antonietta was chatty. “My mother lives with us, too,” she told me. “She’s 87.”
Like my mom and me, I thought, and like so many other adult children caring for a parent. Antonietta’s forehead creased at a red flag on her screen.
“Oh! That’s her,” she finally exclaimed in a cryptic “a-ha” moment, staring at my mother’s name on one of the lines of the tax form.
“That’s her,” I agreed.
“No, it should be your name. It’s the person who gets the check in the event of a refund,” she said, bludgeoning the delete key.
Imagine that. Last year when I filed for her, my mom had owed. I’d never considered a refund with no mom to spend it on. The lump in my throat materialized and a tidal wave of grief swelled, but just as quickly my sarcasm blew it back out to sea. “Okay, yes, that should be my name. She won’t be cashing any checks.”
The preparer’s breath hitched before she caught herself and assessed my expression. I cracked a small smile, and she smiled back into her lap as she read my full name from my driver’s license.
“I guess that would be scary,” she said, now allowing herself to enjoy the joke. Actually, in my mom’s final days, I gave her permission to come back and haunt me anytime, with only an inkling of how much I would want to see her again. But she hadn’t, and I didn’t know why.
Filing your taxes when you’re dead isn’t that different from filing them when you’re alive — you just can’t sign your own forms.
Antonietta dove into the details of how her mom had lived a vibrant life in Venezuela amongst family and friends until the economy there collapsed and she came to live with Antonietta in the U.S. My chest tightened at the thought of a vulnerable parent so far away, but Antonietta had a more immediate worry.
“How did your mother make new friends? My mother is so lonely,” she said.
I had struggled with this, too, but it was before we moved my mom a thousand miles north to live with us, away from Florida, where life is ruthlessly dependent on the automobile. While Antonietta’s mom had been plucked from a well-knit community, my mom’s life had unraveled as she began to cut herself off from friends and hobbies, presumably because navigating daily life was becoming more difficult, and she didn’t want people to know. Providing her with opportunities for enrichment and community without quitting my job was one of my biggest concerns in bringing her to live with us. I told Antonietta how we had lucked out based on our zip code.
“The county senior center provided transportation to and from home any day she wanted to go. She made friends in her age range and had a chance to do many of the activities she loved that had fallen by the wayside when she quit driving,” I said.
More conversation revealed that Antonietta’s mother could attend that same senior center my mom had loved. I could picture my mom meeting Antonietta’s, then coming home to tell me all about this interesting woman from a country in Latin American…which one was it? Mom couldn’t remember, but they’d had the best conversation. As Antonietta and I worked through the tax return line by line, my mom felt closer.
I was suddenly glad to spend this time with Antonietta, someone caring for her mother the way I missed caring for mine. Somehow, by inviting me into a space with her and her mother, she was helping me see why my mom had yet to re-materialize. Maybe she simply couldn’t because I hadn’t made space for her. Without even realizing it, in closing myself up to the things I wasn’t ready to feel, I’d put up a wall she couldn’t walk through.
While I dug around to find the senior center’s contact information to pass along, Antonietta kept clicking away until she let out a happy little cry.
“You get a refund,” she said, “It should come in the mail in a few weeks.”
What in the world am I going to do with my poor mom’s refund? I thought.
My mom replied in her trademark stage-whisper: “Sweetiekins, why don’t you go buy something fun with the money?”
“Something ‘yummy-fied good?’” I asked, borrowing a phrase from our mother-daughter language.
“Pre-xactly!” she exclaimed, trotting next to me as I walked out into the mall.
I told her not to hold her breath waiting for the IRS to send the paper check, and her cackling laughter lit up my life again.
P.J. Powell co-hosts the podcast “Write Away with Nat and P.J.” Her short fiction has been published in Across the Margin, Manawaker Studio’s Flash Fiction Podcast, Perceptions Magazine, Voices de la Luna, and Youth Imagination Magazine. A strategic communications consultant and writer, P.J. is also a staunch defender of the productivity-boosting benefits of short naps, long walks, and dance breaks. Follow her on Twitter @2PSays, and visit her blog at Creatorology.com.
