Taxing times

As always, I’m amazed by what sets me off and what doesn’t.

On Friday, Christina came back from a run to the cemetery to tell me that the glass globe we had set upon Colin’s grave had been stolen. It was nothing too special. It was a Superman blue bauble we’d probably spent all of 12 euros on when we took a run to Glashütte, outside Berlin, in the autumn. We’d originally wondered if we would have the vertical stones in the gravestone be this color, but then decided to go with the stones that came with the original design and to add to it.

Which we did, and now someone decided, while wandering through a graveyard, that “Hey, I’ll steal a pretty stone off a grave.” Maybe they feel they got bonus points for stealing it from a child’s grave.

It’s not cool and it’s depressing and, yet, when Christina told me, my main reaction was “Meh, people suck.”

What got to me? Preparing my 2020 US tax return.

It was the first one I’ve done since 2015 without Colin on it. And I don’t know why that would get to me so much. I remember last year it felt weird including him on the 2019 tax return, but he had been alive for nine months of 2019, so it seemed like he should be included. But he wasn’t alive for any part of 2020, so his name disappeared from the forms. I didn’t have to do the special online form for US citizens with overseas bank accounts. Just like that, the workload for this particularly annoying job shrank by a quarter.

It probably didn’t help that “Bad” by U2 started playing in the middle of it all, because the universe likes to kick you when you’re down, and that’s one of the songs I had one of my more impressive public cries to back in 2016, right after he first got the diagnosis.

And I guess there’s the creeping foreboding that this isn’t done. Because the government keeps sending me stimulus checks, even though I live in Germany. The US government insists that you’ve got to do these tax returns even if you live in Germany and, for all practical purposes, have no financial dealings with the US. And it’s annoying and a waste of paper, but I guess the upshot is that it gets you into the system when they start mailing checks. I got one after the first stimulus about a year ago and I got a second one back in January after the second stimulus deal was finished and I can only assume that some Treasury elf is toiling away on my third check now that the final stimulus bill has been passed.

I mean, I need to be clear on this. I didn’t ask for these checks. I didn’t sign up anywhere for them. And they just arrive, with little in the way of explanation. The first one was closely followed by a letter from Donald Trump, but that was political. There is nothing explaining why I’m getting this sum of money and how the figures were arrived at. But it’s not hard maths. The numbers add up to a payment for me and then three payments for dependents.

So, four people. Except Colin was dead before anyone in China had ever developed the first signs of Covid-19. And yet he’s getting stimulus checks. Even though I sent his death certificate to the US consulate here and then, when they didn’t respond, followed up to make sure that the US government knew that my son was dead. But I guess State doesn’t talk to Treasury, or maybe the State Department uses the same mailing service that got my Christmas cards to the States just in the last week. But it’s pretty clear that the people in Treasury are still looking at the 2019 forms, with three children on it.

So, here I sit, getting money I don’t really need and certainly didn’t request and, honestly, think wasn’t handed out using the best means testing. And I don’t really have any use for it and I’m disinclined to use it because some of it was sent in error to a dead boy and I dread the phone call or email that will come at some point when the Treasury Department realizes that Colin was dead when they mailed the check. I don’t feel like explaining this to another government official. I don’t feel like having money that was meant for Colin to use to stimulate the US economy – God knows, he would have done so, purely on Lightning McQueen merchandise if he could have – just so I can go through a song and dance at some undetermined date about the wisdom of sending unneeded money overseas based on year-old tax forms.

So yeah, tax season kind of sucked this year. And I suspect it’s not done with me.