While I really hate being such a "Debbie Downer" this early in the year, I'm getting extremely frustrated with the red tape surrounding my mother's passing. The basic: we are still waiting on the life insurance to cut loose enough money to bury my mother. While she pre-paid the funeral expenses, she didn't have enough money to pay for a plot —
and without the life insurance money, neither do we.

I'll spare the details of dealing with government-based life insurance (Mom was a Federal Government retiree). The funeral home has been as helpful as possible (which is actually very helpful, especially in terms of compassion and empathy), but the end result is that we are dealing with businesses, and at the end of the day, they need to report a profit (or at the very least, the lack of a loss).

Another side-effect of this is that while I am in Queens, I am not working in New Jersey. This means that the few dollars I've been pulling in from the current part-time job... aren't coming in. Considering that monies are so tight that I'm traded off a week's food money to be able to get out here in the first place, I'm walking a fine line between being at my sister's side and getting stranded in Queens. None of this is getting us the cartons we need to pack up the stuff we will be keeping, or The Other Half and me getting things moved from (what is currently) the office of our New Jersey apartment into the living room, so my sister will have some privacy and a place to sleep.

The frustration of hours on hold with the government, days on hold in Queens, and finances on hold (or non-existant) is not giving me the time and space to process the fact that my mother is gone from us forever. The uncertainty of when we will be able to bury my mother leaves me just as unable to travel from Queens to New Jersey and back as the lack of finances. My blood pressure has been holding steady at its normal level, but I've been running a higher-baseline glucocoaster as meals are at irregular times, interspersed with times of intense cleaning and discarding and times of doing absolutely nothing.

I'm in a holding pattern, and until the roadblocks are removed, I don't have the time and the space to grieve.