When the S&H was small, he was seriously under-impressed when promised delights and occasions tomorrow. ‘Why do I have to have it tomorrow?’ he enquired, ‘Why Tomorrow, why not Tnow?’
As my mother’s illness progresses and the complications both financial and practical increase, I have been trying to behave like the best concatenation of a person with life experience and three-year-old that I can summon up. I have been doing my best to provide for Tomorrow whilst concentrating my attention on TNow.
There are entire religions that focus on a belief that is tricky to argue with: yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, it’s called the present because it’s a gift and all you’ve really got, Sunshine. Though possibly wrapped up in more highfalutin‘ language, ’cause of it being a religion and all. All we really know is this here now, you and me connecting through the medium of these words. And by the way, hello, how are you? Thank you for reading when you are so busy.
When the financial advisor advised me to stick my mother in a home for Christmas because the mortgage lender had ‘made a mistake’ and could not give another three month’s borrowing on the house, which they had said they could right up to the point that they said they could not, I was at a loss for a short time.
One of the interesting points about being someone’s financial attorney, is that you get to see how someone else orders their finances. There is high level futures trading, there is borrow from everyone and hope to die before the pay-back, there is sock on the end of the bed, there is rigid accounting with double entry book keeping, there is too much month left at the end of the money and every other permutation of these and other methods of doing the sums. I had previously not been a happy bunny that every time my father had a bit of capital waving around spare he had made another little investment with the nice man who came to the door, with the new account as advertised by the high street building society and so on. Two summers ago when my mother was having a relatively healthy phase I took a few weeks and went through all the bits of paper to work out how many death certificates I would need when my mother dies to notify all the organisations that my father had invested a little bit of spare cash with. Then I wrote them all an undated letter detailing the accounts, saying that my mother had died and telling them I enclosed the death certificate and then printed each one off in quadruplicate, one for the organisation, two for the solicitor, one for me. I did this partly because there is no computer or printer at my mother’s and partly because getting organised is my job as attorney and also because I thought when I needed the letters I might be too upset or short of time to do it properly. So I sat indoors in the height of the summer, writing what turned out to be eighteen letters checked, cross referenced, spell checked, last known postal address verified and all the associated phone calls made and so on until the summer was over and I had a massive sheaf of papers to show for it.
So two winters set in and here am I TNow miserably shivering in the cold, hoping for some help, when who should come galloping over the hill to my rescue but me! I made appointments last week and was utterly overjoyed to find that after all that many a mickle makes a muckle. There is enough money here and there when all scraped together to keep my mother in her own home until the end of April. I could not be more happy than if I was going to inherit it all.
Now, of course, my mother is fraught with worry about what happens if she dies, before Christmas, on Christmas, just after Christmas and so on. This has enabled me to assure her that whatever happens it will be happening in her own home. I do have massive private worries that if it does happen round then, she will not be able to make her body donation as planned and worked for over the last three years, I worry that the worry will make her ill and aggressive when the baby is there, I worry that we will have to get up at the crack of dawn to be there early enough for me to cook a turkey and my arthritic hands are such rubbish in the cold.
But right now I am going to make my Christmas cards and enjoy that TNow. Tomorrow anything may occur, the money I have scraped together may not be enough and I may have to end up putting my mother in a home next spring. However according to my new religion of the TNow, next spring does not exist and as, in the past, which was TNow then, I got to grips with what I had to do and did it, I have saved the day financially TNow, there is not as much to worry about as I thought.
Now, where’s that card and paper and the rubber stamps? I’m all set for a happy afternoon. What nice thing are you doing TNow? Perhaps you might like to enjoy TNow as an act of faith, not just because it will make you happy but because, no worries, that’s all there is.
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JaneLaverick.mindfulness and all that