The last two days have been a doozy.

Erin is still here (thank goodness) serving as wise counsel, decision making partner, extra muscle, and baseball and hockey watching buddy to both me and C. She’s magic and we’re grateful she’s here.

Yesterday (how was it only yesterday?!) we made a list. “THINGS TO DO” I titled it in my fancy e-notebook. Most of it was easy stuff:

Freeze credit cards, make sure I can log in to stuff, change hulu/netflix/hbo/youtube/spotify/appleTV/HBO streaming to my credit card. Unsubscribe to at least 2 of those. Hang up new canvas picture of the “do this” we made last week. Email the lawyer. Email the financial planner. Take the old medicines to the CVS dropoff bin.

Some of it was stuff I’ve been planning for a while or was regular stuff:

Remove the desk downstairs and make a “guitar lesson” nook for Conor. Rewire the vintage lamp. Take the old soundbars to goodwill. Help Conor add his guitar teacher to his friend list in Fortnite so they can play sometimes. Go to Conor’s baseball game.

And some of it was tricky and required a lot of help:

OK the desk actually falls into this category. (Advil for E, Becca and me for sure.) Getting a new home for the tempurpedic bed.

And as it turns out, as I uncovered as I was on a stroll with Erin before dinner:

Absolutely every single piece of that fairly simple stuff was absolutely heavy as fuck.

Having to figure out the streaming stuff was a painful reminder that he isn’t here to manage all of that. Emailing about the estate flagged that, though we had planned a lot, there was still so much to sort out. Taking the medicines was an obscene show of just how much was required to keep him out of pain these last 12 months. He never even got to go to one of C’s baseball games.

The new living room set up was something we dreamed up together – planned when we did our porch addition. He never got to see it. Only ever got to see Conor play his new guitar twice. The lamp is something we picked out together and honestly, built the entire room around it. The login and parental controls for Xbox/Fortnite were tricky and I couldn’t figure them out.

And the desk was the last piece I hadn’t gone through. Notebooks full of his (impossible to read) writing. A card I had given him when we’d been dating for 3 months and I was already head over heels. Care instructions for the cutting boards he made people.

And the bed – a physical reminder of what where he had been the majority of the time for 6 months – an important gift that allowed us to sleep in the same space after he had been in a chair the previous 7 months. A bed that made it possible for him to sleep but made my shoulder and hip ache.

I’m so glad it’s gone. And yet, it’s so weird that it’s not here.

And he’s still not here. We didn’t have enough time to figure these things out. We didn’t get enough time in a regular bed.