Debt and Grief from the Drafts

It has been a hard few years, especially since the death of my mom in September of 2023. I am finally getting back into the swing of work, and in doing so, cleaning out the half-finished drafts since her passing. These are pieces I don’t think fit on my professional blog, and so I am going to share them here. Today’s piece is one I wrote this spring:

This week, we finally dispersed and dissolved the bank account for my mom's estate. It's weird calling what my mom left an estate; the word calls to mind large homes on acreage, maybe with a horse or two. My mom lived in a rowhome of less than 1,000 SF. She drove a 2011 Toyota Matrix, and while she owned no horses, she had an ornery cat we had to rehome.

December 2024, my sister and I dissolved the bank account we had to create to consolidate all the various ways my mom had money so we could then disperse per her will. The dinky life insurance policy she got with her union and the not-so-dinky one she got through State Farm. The sale of her 2011 Toyota Matrix, the two shares of some random-ass stock, the IRA, the 401K, the vacation fund, the profits from selling some of her things that we didn't want or couldn't fit in our similarly small homes.

While we collected this money into the estate account, we spent our own money on an estate appraiser, an estate attorney, the probate fee, moving companies, food and drink for an after-funeral gathering, companies to haul donations and junk, repairs to the house to make it ready to sell, utility bills that came after her bank account was frozen, and more. If my father weren't already in Arlington Cemetery with room in the Columbarium for my mom, we'd be adding burial to what we had to pay for from our personal accounts.

It was over a year that we dealt with my mom's estate, and that was with the assistance of an estate attorney. An expensive fucking year. Just three weekends before my mom died unexpectedly, I had emergency retina surgery that my horrible old insurance considered elective. It costs around $30,000.00 USD to get a sclera buckle, which doesn't include the separate bill for the anesthesiologist.

After the surgery, I had to wear a protective cup over my right eye, with medical tape holding it to my face and blocking my view. Once I got the okay to remove the protector, I still couldn't see because my eye was swollen shut. It was still red and drooping down at the time of my mom's funeral.

I couldn't drive for weeks, I had aching pain around my eye, I could only sleep on one side and it's not my regular side, and I gotta say it's not fun having contracts to model for campaigns with a purple swollen-shut eyeball. But it was better than losing my vision.

I am on a payment plan with the hospital to pay off the cost of my eye surgery. After realizing I wasn't going to get insurance to pay any more than a few thousand, I decided to see it as a positive, the most valuable purchase, and the best self-care I could give myself.

This spring, I finally got my estate distribution and got back out of debt. Because this was not the first time, but the third time as an adult that I ended up seriously in debt. The first time was being young and stupid, the other two times, it was due our country’s relationship with healthcare.