Unexpected Miracles

Originally posted at The Way of the Rose Facebook group April 13, 2020

Novena Day 54

The Glorious Mysteries

The Resurrection

Yesterday I left you at a pretty bleak place in my story. Yesterday we prayed the sorrowful mysteries. Today we pray the glorious mysteries—it’s time to tell you about the miracle.

I kept the joint checking account after Bill and I split up. I hate paperwork and bureaucracy and avoid it whenever possible. More than once my laziness in this regard bit me in the butt. My debit cards would get mailed to his address, even his OLD address, no matter how many times I called the bank and tried to get him taken off the account or even just make my address the primary address. Eventually someone told me he had to go in to a branch (ours was in the World Trade Center and was long gone) and do it in person. He did. They told him it was done. Nope. Turns out we both had to go into a branch together.

One day I discovered that the bank had given all the money I had in the world at that time, $10,000, to a state agency tasked with recovery of back child support because there was an outstanding judgment against Bill that he didn’t even know about. (Remember that irony thing? Bill had two more children—accidentally—with two different women. One was post-vasectomy! And there were two years when I got zero child support.) I got the money back, but it was a tremendous hassle that took several months and left me with a very bad taste in my mouth with regard to Chase, my bank for the past twenty years. They could easily have informed me about the hold before handing over my money six days later and charging me for the pleasure.

Utterly disgusted with Chase’s treatment of a long-term customer, I intended to close that account as soon as the situation resolved . . . but I didn’t. I had too much going on and somehow I just never got around to it. There was something else I never got around to that I berated myself for whenever I noticed it. An automatic payment for about $75 had been going out of my account every month. It was Bill’s charge that I had tried to get him to take over, but somehow it never quite happened. In my harsher moments, I kicked myself for allowing nearly a thousand dollars a year to leave my account with nothing to show for it.

When we knew Bill had mere weeks left to live and he told me that all of his term life insurance had expired, I flipped into problem-solving mode. I looked up social security and realized that once Bill died, my son’s payment would probably be more than my child support had been in recent years anyway, and because we had been legally married for more than 10 years, I was also entitled to survivor’s benefits until my son turns 16. If I could get out of New York City, my expenses could drop low enough that I wouldn’t have to make much more than that for a while.

Then I remembered that charge that had been going out of my account every month for years. Wasn’t that an insurance payment? But didn’t I see that it was still coming out? I looked it up, and yes, it had been withdrawn as usual the previous month. Bill had no idea what it was for, so I called the phone number the bank gave me: John Hancock, an insurance company. That was encouraging. If they were still taking money out, didn’t that mean he still had a valid contract?

By this time Bill was about three weeks into the four to six weeks that the doctors had estimated he had left. His mind was beginning to blur from the painkillers. He had little-to-no memory of a John Hancock policy. I eventually managed to verify that Hancock did have an active life insurance account in his name, but as I wasn’t the account holder they wouldn’t discuss it with me. Bill assured me that I had to be the beneficiary as he didn’t even have the paperwork anymore. He did manage to find an old spreadsheet that listed a John Hancock policy for $250,000 term life policy. That actually rang a bell. It sounded like the life insurance policy he’d bought soon after Kalea’s birth, around the time we had gotten married.

With Kalea’s help, he was finally able to get through to customer service at John Hancock and verify the details. Yes, he had an active account. Yes, it was good till his sixtieth birthday, which he was never going to see. Yes, I was the beneficiary listed on the account.

When he asked the amount he heard, “For a hundred thousand.”

“A hundred thousand,” he repeated, a little disappointed but noting that it was certainly better than nothing.

The agent on the other end said, “No, sir. For a hundred thousand.”

“Yes, I got it,” he said, “a hundred thousand.”

“No, Dad,” Kalea said, “I think he’s saying four hundred thousand.”

Indeed he was. Somewhere along the way Bill had increased the amount on that first policy that didn’t expire till his sixtieth birthday and completely forgotten about it.

Both of them were crying when he texted me the amount along with several exclamation points. I was stunned, four hundred thousand dollars out of nowhere.

I had been paying on that policy for nine years without even knowing it. If I had done the sensible thing and closed that account or stopped paying the mysterious charge, there is no doubt the contract would have been canceled and I would never have known it. We had moved four times since he bought that policy. They’d never have found us.

Bill said it felt full circle-ish. He had started out wanting to support me and my creative endeavors (including our children, of course), and now he would be providing the means that would allow me to finally pursue my writing.

For me, there was no other way to see this than as a straight-up miracle, a miracle that allowed me to buy a house in upstate New York on an incredibly beautiful piece of property without having to worry about how to get or pay a mortgage—because, let’s face it, my credit report wasn’t what it once was. A miracle that means in this time of fear, my corner of the world is relatively unaffected while Brooklyn experiences constant ambulance sirens. Every time I look out my front window or walk along the creek, I think of the man whose desire to care for me and our children made it possible.

Look for the miracles. They are all around us even when we can’t see them. The power of love can make something out of nothing.

This concludes my stint as your guide, and it also concludes this novena. We spend the next two days reflecting on the past novena and choosing our next intention.

I urge us all to consider our petitions carefully. We are in a very—I described it on a Way of the Rose Zoom call yesterday as “pregnant”—time. You can feel it, can’t you? We now have a golden opportunity to give birth to a miraculously more beautiful world if we joyously accept the challenge, make our grand plans in the community of the Visitation, and dare to dwell in the darkness and pain until it comes forth.