If It Only Cost You Money . . .
I remember calling my father once about a business I’d hired to do a job, and discovering they had done it badly. I had photographic proof they hadn’t put down the primer and that they hadn’t done the sanding on one section of the house that they’d said in our contract they would do. I’d tried contacting the head office, who tried to offer me what they could in compensation, another coat of the top layer of paint. That wasn’t really what they’d promised and I was considering refusing to pay the final payment and going to court with them. I called my father and he recommended strongly against going to court.
He said, “if it only cost you money to learn this lesson, you’re lucky.”
I thought at the time that this was a ridiculous and privileged thing to say. I was so strapped for money with my four little kids and one on the way. I could barely afford to pay for medical care and food for my kids. The house painting had come out of my only savings account and there was nothing left there. I’d exhausted that one cushion and I was scared and angry and scared some more.
However, five years later when my daughter died, I was in a completely different financial situation. And suddenly, my father’s phrase was haunting. It cost me a lot more than money to learn whatever lesson my daughter’s death taught me. I’d have paid any amount of money to avoid that outcome. My father and other people tried to help us by offering money (and my father sent us a check that year and every year until he died in my daughter’s memory to help soften the blow). But it didn’t matter. It felt useless to have people offer to help pay for her grave and headstone. We bought lots of things to remember her, but those costs will never equal what we wanted to pay—for her growing up, for her college, for everything we would miss.
I still think that my father was both right wrong when he said this. There is a lot of privilege in a life in which you can pay money to avoid problems. Few people have that kind of cushion. And yet, money doesn’t fix everything. Arguably, it doesn’t fix very many things that matter. But now that I have a little money, it is so wonderful when I can throw it at a problem that money does fix.