The Sacrament of Estate Work

It’s not just a paper; it symbolizes your person

In the summer of 2022, I sat on the floor of my home office surrounded by stacks of papers and file folders. I looked at the litany of tasks—the ocean wave of grief rose from my root through my solar plexus. My heart ached. My big brown bookshelf stuffed with academic textbooks and therapeutic literature stared down at me. I thought of The Tasks of Mourning Its clinical language seemed so distant and abstract from my lived experience.

The Tasks of Mourning—Thoughts from My Therapist Self

Therapists distinguish grief from mourning/grieving. Grief is the emotional or internal experience. Mourning/grieving is the outward expression of our grief. In a sense, the grief is the what, and the mourning/grieving is the how. Differentiating the what from the how can help us name what’s happening and learn to be with the weight of loss. Differentiating also helps honor how our grief remains. The change is how we learn to live with and be with our grief.

Psychologist William Wordern developed a model to focus on the process of mourning. Worden’s pragmatic model focused on forward movement. He identified four developmental tasks that grievers must work through to adapt to their loss:

• accepting the reality of the loss

• processing grief and pain

• adjusting to the world without your loved one

• finding a way to maintain a connection with your loved one while embarking on your own life

  

My Inner Client to My Therapist Self

Tasks 1 &2: To accept the reality and experience the pain

I confronted the reality of their loss and felt pain with each paper I touched. I don’t know that I accepted it so much as felt slapped in the face by it. Pain…yes. I experienced plenty of that.

Task 3: Adjust to the new environment without the lost person

When? I had no time to adjust to the world without them. My logistical task list left little space for adjustment.

Task 4: Reinvest in the new reality

I yearned to embark on my own life, but the existential weight of two unexpected deaths, compounded by the handling of the logistics of the estate, felt so big.

I needed something sliced thinner. To help me hold on just for today. Just for an afternoon. Or this moment.

By November, I recognized that the “mundane” and “ordinary” tasks of the estate bore the emotional weight of much more. I learned to buffer time around direct client work. I blocked my calendar to spend time with grief and to allow the feelings to swell. I welcomed the heavy energy that flooded me in moments when I crossed items off of the to-do list.

After I finished my client work late afternoon, I logged on to the brokerage portal to sell the stocks my father purchased. The financial advisor instructed me to “harvest losses” to defray the tax burden. The system required me to sell each position individually and intentionally.

Click once to sell. Click twice to select the method. Click three times to confirm.

Pause. Wait. Complete.

As I clicked sell for each position, I watched the account shrink. Tears welled and overflowed. I baptized the keyboard with my tears while I typed.

What if this list of to-dos, this task of mourning, is more than that? What if it’s a living symbol of death? The Voice whispered.

I felt grief rise, crest, and fall. Chills ran up my spine.

Yes. This to-do list is so much more than a series of checkboxes. My Soul reflected.

Each account number, each subscription, and each form became holy. Each paper symbolized the personhood of my parents. Each signature, each email, and each scanned document enfleshed the absence of Mom and Dad’s physical presence. Each task became a Sacrament, a physical expression of what was and is.

My body released as I exhaled more fully than I had in months. I assumed that my spiritual life stood across the Grand Canyon from the world of the estates. I thought the chasm could never be crossed. I attempted to contain my emotions and silence my spirituality when I faced the to-do list. That cold November afternoon, my Soul invited me to see the estate work differently. The estate paperwork transformed into a Sacramental bridge that helped me cross the Valley of the Shadow of Death. I could administer the estate with all of me, and my Soul would lead. I would enter the new reality by becoming more wholly myself.

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