We should do a Willie check. 

Well, I should do a Willie check. You should focus on getting your mind out of the gutter because I’m not even talking about that kind of Willie. 

Yet. 

Do you guys remember the taxes? How I spent nearly two long, long years recreating the documents I needed to file five years’ worth of Willie’s back taxes? 

I mean, I have a show to finish bingeing. I can watch it while you hit that link. And the link in that link. And the link in that link.  

Done? Memory refreshed? 

OK. I want you to remember the taxes while I tell you this tale. 

I spent all of December cleaning out Willie’s apartment.  

It was an epic task. 

First, Willie’s boyfriend — unbeknownst to me — had Willie’s apartment key. He and Willie’s friends were letting themselves into Willie’s apartment, taking random objects to Willie’s new place, all higgledy-piggledy like there’s not an orderly way to stage a move between apartments. 

I mean, I had categories of items piled throughout Willie’s old apartment. I drew a map of the piles. I labeled each category. I wrote up a calendar of what would move when. I sent it all to my siblings. 

Yeah, yeah. I hear you saying I’m intense. That I probably annoy my siblings. 

First off, I’m the oldest. My life’s mission is to annoy my siblings.  

Second, we moved 80 years of Willie-accumulated stuff in four weeks. You don’t get there without a little map drawing and, like, 87 Post-it notes labeling piles of Willie’s belongings.  

So shush. 

Back to the enormity of clearing out Willie’s apartment. 

Aside from Willie’s boyfriend moving things to Willie’s new apartment in stark violation of my categories and calendar, Willie couldn’t decide what to keep and what to move. 

Which I understood. She had everything from her wedding dress to a contentious letter from my gym teacher to a half-full bottle of Apple Jack brandy to a VHS tape of A Christmas Carol. 

How do you sort through your life in the middle of a move cruelly portending that life’s waning years?  

Worse, I couldn’t decide, either. Right now, everything Willie owns that’s not in her new apartment is packed in boxes, stacked in my garage. 

Listen. I don’t feel good about that decision.  

I’m sure my husband feels even worse.  

But I bet the mice and skinks living in my garage are here for it. 

Lastly, Willie is a collector of papers. Bank statements from the nineties for accounts long shuttered. Explanation of benefits from Medicare going back a decade. Mail order pharmacy receipts.  

And Willie prints everything. Amazon orders and vacation confirmations. Emails and medical records. Parkinson’s information she never used on Indy and recipes she never cooked. 

Willie had two drawers the length of my leg filled with papers. Stacks of papers sat on windowsills and on closet shelves. Binders and files filled her desk. 

One binder is a three-inch wide, red, three-ring binder. Anytime Willie signed up for a service — an airline, for example, or eBay — Willie printed out the login page, scribbling her user identification and password in the margins. 

That this binder even existed filled me with emotions.  

Frustration. Confusion. Bewilderment. 

A decade ago, as a gift, Willie asked me to help Indy buy her an electronic password protector from Hammacher Schlemmer.  

Indy never caught onto the internet. I ordered the password protector for him — with my credit card so Willie wouldn’t see the charge. 

Even though she knew I was helping Indy order it. Even though she knew how much it cost. Even though Indy paid me back with $7, a Trader Joe’s gift card, and one Ollie’s gift card worth $27.79. 

Welcome to my life. There is, according to Tears for Fears, no turning back. 

Willie, being a gadget girl, loaded her passwords into the Hammacher Schlemmer electronic password protector. It’s the first place I looked when I needed access to her online Social Security and IRS accounts for the back taxes. 

When I couldn’t find them, I figured she never set up online accounts. Who does, really? 

Well, Willie does. 

When I found that red binder, I absently flipped through it. None of the printouts were older than 2012. I decided to shred the binder’s contents. 

So that’s what I was doing Friday.  

Friday. 

A completely useless day to discover Willie’s IRS and Social Security logins right there, in the red binder. They were under my nose the entire time. 

A few weeks ago, I bought Willie new lipstick. It was lost a week later.  

Well. I’m not falling for that again. 

It’ll turn up. 

Probably in a red binder somewhere.