WHEN THE SUPPORT NETWORK COLLAPSES

My dad died about two months before we began to make due with our thinner wallets. In terms of our support network, a lot happened at once. My dad was the kind of larger-than-life fellow who could make everything seem like it was going to be OK. He was always ready to pitch in and help a person out, with a bail-out loan, some advice, a job offer, or just to commiserate. I think it was always in the back of my mind that if all else failed, I could go to my dad.

To a lesser extent, the same attitude applied to our many credit cards: if we got into a jam, we could always charge our way out of it. As long as we made the minimum payments, we were able to block out the bigger, darker picture that we were painting with our financial misfires. Finally, drowning in debt, we turned to debt management. Which helped us, but which also meant that we no longer had access to a single dollar of credit.

Then some major extra sources of income dried up, and we were both hit with pay reductions due to furlough days, and I received notice of a potential lay-off, and it just seemed that everything we counted on was gone. 2009 was a rough year. My dad’s death left my mother less financially secure than we had expected, and so we have to assume that we will one day be her support, rather than vice versa. We realized we were really, truly, starkly on our own.

We have now been surviving on our thinner wallets for half a year – one tenth of our pay-off time to being credit-card-debt-free – and obviously the sky is not falling. We have done without a lot of things, and we are still smiling. The money issues are all going to work out, as long as we keep up our end of the deal. We will again feel financially supported, as long as we continue to make healthy decisions. We will survive. We will, I daresay, thrive.

The empty space my dad has left will never be filled. Even so, to quote St. Julian of Norwich, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

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