We are still dealing with the after effects of my step-son’s death.

We need his social security number to get a death certificate, but we can’t find his card anywhere. We are going to have to go to the social security office in Monday to see if they can give it to us. All we have is a scan of his birth certificate, so it’ll be interesting.

After that, we need to get a probate lawyer. He was living in his grandmother’s house, which was still in probate from her death in February. His mother died last December. So, it’s going to be a complicated situation.

I don’t know what’ll happen, but I can’t just leave the house empty. It needs to be cleaned out and either sold or put in someone’s name. He has brothers, but his 2 half brothers on his mother’s side are both in jail. It’s possible that we’ll need to sell the house and give the money to his brothers somehow.

I just don’t know. Since their mother is dead, and she once asked me to make sure her kids were taken care of. Of course, that was before they were all 18 and the other 2 in jail.

I’ve started writing to my step-son in a journal, trying to work through my feelings of guilt. I wonder if he knew how much he was loved. I never said it after he became a teenager. I would give him hugs, but not so much as he got older.

I try not to think about how much pain he was in. I’m not sure how the holidays will go. I know it’s going to be rough, I may just need to make an extra pecan pie and give it away. We always had to make 2 because he’d eat more than half of one on his own.

I’m also going to have to find pork belly somewhere. That was another thing we’d have to rush if we wanted to get any. He loved it.

I’m trying to remember the funny things, like when we had a yellow orb spider on the front porch, that I left alone so it would eat the mosquitoes. He was afraid of spiders so he spray painted it.

We have his Rubik’s cubes. I’m going to have to learn how to solve the ball one, and the one that has different size blocks that stick out until it’s solved.

I’m trying to remember the good times. Like the trips we took. I can’t find any pictures of him from our trip to Vermont in 2018, but he was there.

I’m going to miss taking a selfie of my me with my mom or sister with him photobombing.

Right now, it’s still one day at a time. It was hard to do the memorial video and the obituary, but those were up to me because my husband isn’t computer literate.

The next fun thing is to figure out how to pay for the rest of the funeral home charges, on top of the insurance deductible for hitting a deer last week in my Jeep.