My mother passed away on a Wednesday in March, quietly, in her own bedroom, exactly the way she always said she wanted to go. I was holding her hand. My brother Dennis was standing in the doorway. She was eighty-three years old and had lived a full and decent life and I thought I knew everything about her.
Three weeks later, the bank called about an account in her name that none of us knew existed.
The woman on the phone was polite and brief. She said there was a savings account listed under my mother’s name and social security number. She needed to speak with the estate executor about next steps. I told her I was the executor. She gave me the balance.
I asked her to repeat it.
She did.
My mother – a woman who had clipped grocery coupons every Sunday for forty years, who had worn the same winter coat for a decade, who had told me more times than I could count that she had very little to leave us and not to expect much – had four hundred and twelve thousand dollars sitting in a savings account that not one member of our family had ever heard of.
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