Death and taxes

Ian and I finally got around to doing our taxes. The deadline is Friday and since we both dislike doing taxes we put it off until practically the last minute.

My taxes are super-simple: I have only one information slip to enter, so it's not hard to do my taxes. I used quicktaxweb again this year and somehow doing my taxes got a whole lot more complicated. You see, I first answered "Yes" to the question "Do I have a disability?", and so the program calculated a disability tax credit for me. I figured the answer was yes because I'm on disability but then I checked the actual definition for tax purposes and realized that I don't qualify for that credit because my doctor hasn't filled out the right form yet.

But when I changed the answer to that question to "No", quicktaxweb didn't remove the disability tax credit. In fact, there's no way to remove a deduction that depends on the answer to a question if the answer changes. I tried asking their "live chat" which was a computer program that gave an answer for the desktop version of the program, not the web version. I ended up having to scrap that return and start over.

I thought that this bug and solution was ridiculous and I ended up very frustrated and upset. You'd think that with all that meditation and book club stuff I've done, I'd be able to calm myself down... but no, I kind of lost it, much to Ian's dismay. I haven't lost it like that in a while and I'm embarrassed and sad that it happened today.

I guess I was (am?) stressed, in part by the taxes and also because someone else I know died of her breast cancer this week. She was awesome - she was 35, with a 4-month-old daughter that she and her husband had via surrogate. I'm so sad that she's gone. Her husband blogged about the events leading up to her death, which I appreciated even though it was emotionally hard to read. I felt so close to her as she was dying, which makes her death that much more difficult for me. It's easier for me to distance myself from someone's death when I'm only imagining what happened... when I know for sure what happened, it has more impact.