On Feb. 28, 2007, my mom opened a bank account in Michigan. I imagine her sitting down with a bank representative and filling out the paperwork. When it came time to name the death beneficiary on the account, she wrote my name. At that time, she didn't expect that would mean anything. She had other plans for the account.
Instead, my dad and I now sat across a desk from a bank representative, closing her account. It was a concrete acknowledgement that mom was gone. Over and over again, my dad has had to face this sort of thing, but it was the first for me. It felt horrible to terminate something that was hers, and it was made worse by the fact that it I received some monetary benefit from it.
I wanted to keep things as close to the way Mom had left them as I could, so I transferred the funds to another account at the same bank. Mom's money would stay in Michigan, at her bank, at her branch - where Mom had put it. But it didn't feel like enough. I wanted to use it in some way that Mom would have appreciated. Only one idea felt right: a college fund. Part of Mom's legacy would be the education of her grandchildren.
As we drove away from the bank, Dad said that Mom had been putting deposits into the account every chance she got. She planned to surprise me with it several years from now. By then, it would have been a great sum of money. When she gave it to me, it might have gotten me out of a bind. It might have given me the courage to change careers. It might have meant the ability to do something exciting for my family. Mom made those trips to the bank, each time adding more to the gift, and imagined what I would do with her gift. She won't see where the gift goes now, and it isn't the gift she had imagined.
I'm happy that I can put Mom's gift to good use. But it feels strangely empty when I think of her grand plans, left unfinished.