It’s not all about me - Val's Story, Chap 26

I’m not the only one who struggled with the events of August 22, 2025. 

          Since she died around 7:30 that Friday night and we weren’t notified until nearly midnight, I’m not sure of the exact order of events during that time. And maybe it’s best I don’t know, but I do know a lot occurred that night.

          Her boyfriend was home alone with her that night, and whenever it was that the police arrived, it sounds like they immediately suspected him. They tested him for gunshot residue and it came up negative. They did find residue on Val.

          The police still told her boyfriend he had to leave the house, with the dogs, and that he couldn’t come back until they told him he could. They also confiscated his cell phone, her cell phone, and her laptop.

          The next day, as we were notifying everyone else, I was becoming more and more distressed when we couldn’t reach her boyfriend. He finally called us on Sunday, from someone else’s phone, and let us know what was going on. My heart ached for him. The nightmare that we were all going through at least wasn’t staring me in the face, changing every single aspect of my life. I still had my own bed to crawl into at night, my own cell phone to make those dozens of calls.

          On top of all of that, there was still a roommate living in Val’s basement. I didn’t want to kick him out on the street, but we all knew he had to leave. It got to the point where I had to tell him we would have the police remove him if he wasn’t out by a certain date.

          As if I didn’t have enough to take care of.

But that wasn’t all.

          Val had all of her bills set up for automatic payments, but without her laptop, I couldn’t look up her bank accounts to make sure there was enough money. And the police told me they were still looking into her laptop.

          “For what?” I kept asking them.

          “It’s just part of the investigation,” was all they would ever tell me.

          It was equally as difficult to deal with her financial institution. Every time I called them, I was on hold forever, transferred multiple times, told they couldn’t talk to me, and sometimes hung up on. And when I physically went in to talk to someone, they were pretty much just rude to me.

          And then there was the lawyer’s office. When we arrived for the appointment with them, my husband and I were ushered into a conference room to wait. Finally. three young men came in and tried to explain everything that had to take place before the state could settle her estate. After we left the office, I called them Larry, Curly, and Moe.

          Words like domiciliary, probate, and fiduciary mean absolutely nothing to me. I never even asked them to try to explain those terms because I knew they would just use more words which I would never understand.

          But then, the ball wasn’t going to get rolling until I had the final death certificates. But since the police were still “investigating”, the first death certificates we paid for and received stated manner of death as “pending”.

          When the police finally announced they had “closed the case”, the end of October, I had to pay again for the finalized death certificates. 

          Everything seemed like a battle. EVERYTHING.

          And this isn’t even all of the garbage I had to deal with in the months after she passed away. And it wasn’t just Val’s things; I was still taking care of my brother. Even though he was in assisted living, I had to pay that bill monthly, take calls from the facility, the pharmacy, and the VA, and run in when he was being difficult and try to settle him down. 

          But you know what? God had it all figured out. And why would God pile so much more on my plate at that time? He knows me. He knows how I am wired.

All those calls to the police department, visits to the bank, emails to the lawyers’ office? That did two things to me.

First, with juggling all those twenty-some balls at a time, I wasn’t able to think too much. I couldn’t think about the future without Val and I couldn’t dwell on mistakes I had made in the past. I knew that all I could do was take it one day at time, sometimes one minute at a time. And just let go of what I couldn’t control.

The second thing was that when I did start thinking about everything, I got angry. I was angry at the lawyer, the bank, the police, my brother, and mostly Val.

Anger is a strong emotion, and even though it could tear me apart, at least I was feeling something. When things were quiet during that time, I would stare out the window, into my yard, and not see a thing, not feel a feel a thing.

Then I’d get another phone call and at least feel something, even if it was frustration or wrath.   

The first picture is the Wisconsin State Assembly Chamber in Madison. I thought I had one of the State Supreme Court, but I guess not. The picture just above is the former Illinois State Police Headquarters just south of Pontiac. Built in 1941 and in use until 2003, the building is in the shape of a handgun. Why would they do that?