Chapter 62

You’d think that after grandma’s death that My mom and I’s bond would get closer but it did not. In fact, it was still hanging by a thread just like before my graduation recital. If anything, the funeral exemplified the problems my mom and I had. This was expected however. Staying too close to blood relatives was not a good recipe for my family. 

I saw the seeds of discontent that can grow my relationship with mom to the one she had with grandma and did not want it. It was toxic and consumed so much mental energy. Yelling at each other constantly with pestering was not something I wanted a part of. To be healthy we had to be apart and be distant. In this sense, the distance from Toronto to Waterloo acted in good favor for us because space made us both function properly and to be out of each other’s way. It was better this way. With us being as healthy as we can be, naturally rent and money became the only things we discussed. This was because mom had been helping me with rent in university. A fact I am grateful for.

She had always paid for my residence rent fees in University in undergrad and it was no different now in Optometry school. The rent for her condos in Toronto, of which she owned two,was giving a surplus of around $500 each. This amount was after accounting for the mortgage fees and easily covered my rent in Waterloo, which was totaling around $500-700 a month for the entirety of 2012-2020. 

Now, I know for some, this is kind of a horrible way of thinking. By this I mean seemingly brushing off the fact that my mom was helping me with rent. I know. I did keep a ledger and planned on paying her back no matter how little inconvenience it was for her to pay my rent. It just wouldn’t feel right otherwise. Furthermore, as I’ve stated many many times in the past. I did not like to be dependent on my mom. She instilled in me from a young age that she was not to be leaned on and it already hurts me that I had to depend on her for rent. It wasn’t out of pride, it was just a mentality I was ingrained with. 

Regardless of how this came to be, this was the main driving force behind why I didn’t want to ask mom for more money to help with my tuition. I was already indebted to her, I didn’t want any more of that. Before I get to that stage, I would get a summer job or even take a loan from the bank. I had options. Though as it turns out, I wouldn’t really need to pull on any of them. 

During the first few weeks of my first year in Optometry, my mom sent me a message about money. It wasn’t related to rent however. This time it was about grandma’s death. There were two things to talk about. First, we wanted compensation for the funeral from the driver of the SUV. We think this was a fair ask considering it had been mostly their fault according to the police report. While it wasn’t murder, an accident was still an accident. Second, we needed to talk about inheritance of grandma’s estate. 

Let’s first talk about the car accident. 

After the funeral, my mom contacted the SUV driver who struck grandma. She asked the SUV driver to chip in for the funeral because it seemed like a fair ask. The funeral was around $8,500 and quite pricey. In terms I understood, this was like paying my rent for 8 terms of school. When she called the SUV driver however, they brushed off the encounter and said some technical jargon that confused mom. When mom told me about this, I got on the phone with them. To my surprise, the driver, who was a middle-aged Mediterranean lady and who was relatively new to Canada, spoke perfect formal english. Moreso, this middle aged lady had the voice of a male baritone. It was a white a guy. 

Neither mom nor I had been speaking with the driver at all. We’d been conversing with her lawyer this entire time. As I kept talking with this man, he pissed me off. Everytime I talked about something related to compensation, he brought up again and again a narrative of how “It was very common for people to not want to discuss the accident afterwards. Some times after the accident, healing can only happen when we move on from them.”

My thoughts on this? “Seriously?”. He didn’t talk seriously to us at all. There was no blame game nor any pointing of fingers, he just told us that we were weak and couldn’t handle having a conversation about a tragedy because it may shatter our minds from the trauma. 

As I understand the accident, while my grandma was jaywalking, she was no athlete. She was walking in broad daylight with not a cloud in the sky in a 50 km/h zone. She was not hard to spot. All video evidence provided by CCTV cameras in the nearby region couldn’t see what the driver was doing in the video but I suspect she may have been on her cellphone. If the other party decided to lawyer up so early in the game, it seems understandable to reason that the other party had some blame they knew would be coming their way. 

We tried to talk with the lawyer a few more times in the next week in hopes of asking for some form of remuneration but it never went anywhere. The lawyer simply kept deflecting again and again as if they were trying to use a jedi mind trick on us. Then, finally, my mom tells me she has had enough. She said she didn’t know how to handle something like this because no one in our family has ever gone through something similar so the only option she saw was to lawyer up. Right after one meeting with a lawyer firm she found on google, the firm had decided to sue the other party for loss of life. 

From what our lawyers told us, it seems the other side had been fully expecting this to happen and been stalling us for the past few weeks. The first was that it was an accident involving a loss of life and therefore, there were absolutely legal considerations to think of. Second, this was not the first traffic related accident this Mediterranean lady had been involved in. Turns out she has had 2 prior incidents of accidents in the car as well as numerous minor offenses. She had a history. After this, our lawyers got to work for us and mom and I simply sat on the backseat. 

A short while later, a settlement proposal was made. While mom and I hoped to simply get around $10k to cover the funeral costs, we were very surprised to hear that we’d gotten much more. Our number was around $170,000. This was an unexpectedly large sum. Where did this number even come from? I asked the lawyer on our end and they explained quite thoroughly. This was their job.

The maximum payout our lawyer group saw for a death from vehicular accident was around $225,000 CAD. This was the settlement given to a mother who’d lost her infant in the car. Of course there were other considerations such as the driver’s history or if there were any faults of the victims. In our case, it was an 88 year old woman who had been jaywalking. We were supposed to get much less than $225k because being older meant there was less value in a life and my grandma technically having broken the law meant she was a bit at fault. The main reason why our number was still so high was because the driver had a pretty horrible history of past accidents. In the end, the lawyer told us that the blame game was, in layman’s terms, a 60/40 split and the settlement money accounted for all of this. 

This was cold and calculating. It also fascinated me. Remember, during this time of grandma’s passing, I felt distant in that I felt nothing of it while my family sobbed pretty much non-stop. A part of me worried I had some fundamental flaw because I was so unmoved by the death. Maybe I was a psychopath? Maybe I should seek therapy? Maybe I should have gone into law to deal with insurance and death. Regardless. I felt a bit unsettled by my own reactions. 

Then it struck me. If my grandma was getting $170,000, the lady who lost her infant should have gotten much more. Did my lawyers tell me that number in hopes that I’d convince my mom to settle and move on quickly? I asked our lawyers and they said that no, it was in our right to reject the offer but from their expertise, the number was a fair one. The other reason why the number for the infant was low was that it was the largest disbursement number. It was not the settlement money number. I got confused and asked for more information. 

Eventually, what I gathered was that $225k we talked about was the amount that was disbursed directly to the mom. There was another sum that went to dad, which was also incredibly high, and another sum that went to other party members associated with the deceased. This meant that the true number for the settlement money was likely higher. I felt a bit taken back, I saw it then that the lawyer did choose to omit some information about the numbers. She may have told us a number, the disbursement number but not the settlement number, which was lower and closer to our total settlement money in hopes that we’d take one look at how close it was and feel we got way more than we should. I think our lawyer did this deliberately to try and get us to settle without too much hassle, and too much work on their hands. I was slightly offended by this and it seemed dubious but I didn’t care much about any of this. 

This is because, in truth, the lingering lawsuit was taking its toll on mom. I could hear it in her voice. Also, we weren’t really in this for the money. Mom knew this and I did too. After a brief discussion, mom and I chatted and mutually decided that we just wanted it to end here. All we wanted was a bit of help with the funeral and we had already achieved way more than we needed. We weren’t out for blood. We settled. 

In my head, my grandma’s passing, which helped her avoid chemotherapy, was already an act of mercy and benefited our family in the heartaches it avoided. The fact that grandma’s death came with a settlement and leaving our family a large sum of money was just extra credit. A big chunk of this did go to our lawyers but in the end, a decent amount did trickle down to our family. The final settlement was split between everyone in the family by proximity of residence and degree of relationship.

My mom got the most amount because she lived with and took care of grandma. My uncle, mom’s brother, was next because he was the eldest son of the deceased. Up next, it had been me since I lived the closest to mom and grandma. After that, it would be my cousins. The amount I received in the end was around $18,000. 

After seeing more money in my bank account than I had ever seen, I then watched all of this disappear into my tuition. I didn’t really get to spend it at all. I felt grateful about what grandma had left for me, even though she did it unintentionally. Money means something. It gives value to things.

Grandma’s death now served as a tool that paved my path for the future. When you’re a poor university student living off of your loans, every dollar counts. If there is one thing I learned from this entire ordeal with the lawyers, it was that the value of the dollar and money was beyond just the numbers they were. 

I’m unsure as to how my extended family handled the settlement money but I do know how my mom spent it. I’ll tell you more about it in the next chapter. A quick hint towards how mom spent it is that we’d so far only spoken about the unintentional inheritance grandma had left for us. She still had an intentional will we didn’t talk about yet.