Hi. I've read the opening and I've got to say, I don't think you've gotten to the story yet. A story how long it takes a character to change. From the beginning to the end of this part, nothing really happens on a plot level. Things happen on the line by line level, but I found myself reading to see if anything was going to change, and it didn't.
I think you've gotten to the point where you can write down what is in your head in a precise manner, and that's great. It's frustrating when you read a story and the bits you need to make sense of the cool bits are all still locked away in the author's head, so you're making definite progress.
Now, you just need to learn how to only tell the interesting bits.
Your story begins with an obituary. Not exactly the most gripping of prose. Skimming through it, it could be anyone's obituary. As a reader, I'm looking for an interesting character with an interesting problem in an interesting world and then, within the short story, how the main character then solves the problem and what is the intended and unintended outcomes of that solution.
You start with a main character getting ready for his day. It's important to get the tiny moments of reality right in a story, but that's only so that when you get to the point where you get ready for the suspension of disbelieve the reader is ready. This is just about a guy getting ready to go to a funeral and seems far more sad that he is getting older and his house needs decoration than the fact that some guy died. We wouldn't know whether or not he was even going to a funeral if you didn't tell us.
There are five stages of writing; wanting to write, but not having written, writing but not everything you need to say ends up on the page, writing everything that you see and putting it on the page, writing down just the interesting bits, and, then finally, writing down the interesting bits while using your story to tell something about the human condition.
What is George's problem that he is going to be attempting to fix within the confines of this very short story? How is he going to try to make it better? What's stopping him? What is the reason he's going to keep trying to solve the problem when he hits his first bit of resistance?
People love to tell me that if it's literary, it doesn't need a plot or a point. I usually have to ask them what literary books they've read that they've come to this conclusion? All stories need conflict. It may not by the Zarthons attacking planet Blarg, but even in these slice of life pieces of work, there needs to be structure, a character arch, and conflict. Literary fiction should read like the duck swimming across the pond; to the ready it should just look as though it's gliding, but in order for you, the author to make it look smooth and effortless you need to be working your ass off with the ducks feet to make sure that the reader can never tell how hard you need to work to make something look effortless.
Writing is really, really hard work. You've got the surface level of what a story is. No you just need to learn how to drill down and make every piece of work about something, where your main character needs a problem to solve and then tries to solve it.
Yes, you can write a story without conflict, but that isn't easy. You can make a souffle with eggs and it can still fail, but the eggs are the conflict that gives your work its structure. If you are not going to want to use eggs and still call it a souffle, you're going to have to use a thousand substitutions, molecular gastronomy techniques and an extremely complicated recipe to make it work. Your eggless souffle may be even better than the standard egg-ful souffle, but you're going to need a much better cook to make a story work without conflict.
Even with the best conflict eggs on the market, you can bugger up a standard souffle. If it's sweet or savory you'll wind up with an okay pudding or something like scrambled eggs. Not what you hoped for, but still edible. A story without conflict that does not work will probably fail on all fronts.