Grief & Sleepovers

I am numbing out on the winding road of grief management as of late. I literally feel numb, almost lethargic. My energy is zapped and I have completely let the house go to pot. The ugly realizations of mortality and the steady, quick march of time zoom through my mind often and just as often put me into a state of panic. I have no control over how fast a life goes by. I've been watching the Twilight Zone a lot and just the fact that the young, vibrant actors of the 60s are now either old or dead gets me depressed, irritable, pissed. Maybe I should stop watching it... but when that show was in its last season, Grandpa was my age! A young parent just back from war. My dad was born that year. Not so long ago yet still a lifetime. How quickly we age without even realizing it is painful once you do notice that it's happening or has already happened.
Right now I'm sitting in my old room at my parents' house for quite possibly the last time. Billy is putting in his notice tomorrow and that could mean he's coming home immediately or he's in it for another two weeks-30 days. It's been an absolutely crazy year but this has become the new normal. We'll have to learn how to be us again in a normal setting. Weird but true. I really resented this situation at first but now it's almost peaceful... It doesn't seem like home at all. This is quite a revelation to me. I've lived in this house as a high-schooler and I've lived in this house in the interim when we sold our house then off and on when we were on sabbatical then when our current house was being built. We lived here when Billy went to PA for a week and I cried myself to sleep every night. I stayed here when he went on his first business trip ever when he started working at Highland Manor when Bee was a newborn. I cried for a day. Now he's been away so much and been on a myriad business trips it seems silly that I was ever that distraught to sleep without him. It will be strange to have him home all the time. And that in itself is disconcerting.

The Beauty of Zero

Four months ahead of schedule, our credit card debt is no more. It feels like this post should be full of exclamation points and "squee"s and "woot"s and happy dances in general. This is a HUGE feat and accomplishment as well as a giant burden lifted. But I can't get over the fact that this year we brought in an excess of $25770.77 that went to debt. That is SO much money. And it's gone. It's zeroed us out to where we always should have been. Every stupid purchase, mis-paid medical bill, commuter gas fill-up, furniture or baby stuff shopping spree, Christmas gift that we couldn't afford, yay debt moment... PAID OFF. PAID OFF! We have exorbitant student loans and a seriously misguided second mortgage sitting us deeply in the negative to the tune of about $36,000 but these types of debt are not as ugly. It feels weird. The light at the end of the tunnel was really just a brief reprieve from the darkness of debt but we're soaking in the sunshine and basking in the glow of being damn near half way out of the depth of our debt.
As we reached the end of our credit card debt journey, we found out that Grandpa has/had $56000 in credit card debt. This is about double what his life insurance is worth. As this is a community property state, Grandma is in a predicament. Sitting here in our mid-twenties with more debt than life insurance, I'm feeling a strong pull to get our affairs in order. It seems too practical, too depressing, and almost like I'm beckoning for something bad to happen. But what if something did? I don't want to be financially screwed if my life got turned upside down.