Trustee of the trust

I've been drifting for a while now. For a long time, over the past year, I was anticipating the need to care for my mother in a more intense way. She was resistant to our efforts to help her out up until just a few weeks before the lightning bolt struck, and we went into the limbo of hospice care. We are so fortunate that she finally allowed me to help her with financial stuff and my sister to clean her kitchen right before she was struck down. Now I'm emerging from that experience and feeling the need to have more structure to my life. My task for the next few months is to manage the estate process, but that is not something that occupies a lot of time. It's more like a process that engages my anxiety as I try to figure out what to do and how to do it, with a lot of guessing and hurry-up-and-wait.

I have: cancelled subscriptions and utilities, contacted banks and insurance companies, set up a plan with a lawyer for the estate, filed the will with the county, obtained death certificates, gotten a tax number for the trust, prepared a certification of trust document, sent out an inventory of assets and debts, notified heirs (sibs) of their right to contest the trust in 120 days, met with a realtor, helped sort stuff at the condo, worked on planning a memorial event, tried to get answers from HUD and the mortgage administration company as to how to report the death of the borrower, to get a due and payable statement, obtained a payout statement, sent back the driver's license and placard to the DMV. I think I have screwed up on cancelling the condo insurance prematurely so there had better not be any leaks or damage! and I see that they will start charging interest in December for the payout so we are motivated to get things sorted and moved sooner rather than later. I am paying all my mother's bills out of my pocket until I can get access to her bank account (hopefully this coming week) to get reimbursed for around $7500 I have had to pay out so far. Her property taxes will come due in a few weeks. I have initiated her life insurance payout for my sister, who was the only one she left the money to (because mom worried about her). If all goes well and we sell the condo for what is anticipated, once we pay off the reverse mortgage and sale costs, we may each end up with about $20-30,000. Nothing to sneeze at. I am grateful that our mother was able to live at home until the end of her life and that we were able to help her die in a dignified and relatively comfortable way in spite of her dreadful illness. It could have been so much worse. She could have run out of money and been forced to live some crappy nursing home because that was all we could afford. We could have been trying to sell her place while she was still alive. I could have been trying to be her home attendant at the end of her life. We were spared the worst. We did our very best to make those last few weeks as pain-free and peaceful as possible.

Today I went through all the index cards that she used to track her accounts and passwords. I cried at seeing her handwriting, so familiar. I saved a few cards for accounts I still might need to get access to, but I recycled almost all of the rest because I have the information noted in the files I have created to handle each of her accounts. She still has some credit card charges outstanding that I could pay now. I will wait to see if I can get the bank to set me up with access to her accounts so I can pay them with her money instead of mine, but that is an option.  My sister is the one handling a lot of the sorting and packing because she used to do that stuff for a living and I am so glad she  is able to handle it because it would paralyze me whereas I am the one who is best equipped to handle all the financial and bureaucratic stuff, temperment-wise.  Our brother tried his best to contribute before he had to leave town and go back to Maryland but it kind of blew up into an anxiety and grief-fueled argument that we're still recovering from. I'm glad the estate business has all gone as well as it has so far, but I will be really glad when we have cleared all the stuff out of the condo and can focus on getting it painted and staged for sale. 

Meanwhile, I found a book on hospice and grief in the Free Little Library box I stop at on the way to the grocery store. Just waiting for me to find it.