Out From Under

I had already walked the beach that morning, eaten a breakfast my mother-in-law made for the whole family, taken a second walk, and stood a while watching the flowers ring a fountain in a little park. Now I was lying down, easing into one of my most sacred traditions, the post-walk, post-breakfast nap, when my phone buzzed. It was a former coworker, someone displaced from Wells Fargo the way I was, and her question perked me back up. When that last severance check lands in your account, she asked, what does it feel like? Is it tough? Is the finality of it hard? Or is it, maybe, a little freeing?

Where am I?

In one word, my honest answer is relief. That check landed not quite a year after I was displaced from a company I had given twenty-one years of my life to, and a loss that size comes with real grieving. I moved through a lot of the stages that year, depression and anger among them, and I am still working on acceptance. But the relief was bigger than all of it, because I no longer had to dread a last day or move through my work looking over my shoulder. This next chapter of my life is so much better than I could have imagined.

A friend told me recently that she needs to keep wearing the golden handcuffs of corporate life for now, to care for her family, and I understand completely. It is part of why I held on as long as I did, even as the work environment grew harder. I learned an enormous amount over those years, and I am grateful for the lessons, even the ones that only come from the hard seasons. By the time that last check arrived, I mostly had my plan in place. Healthcare had transitioned to my husband’s employment, I had steady income from a solid contract, and I am five months into a six-month sabbatical my husband and I chose on purpose. Her question just sent me looking at the pieces I had handled, and the one or two I hadn’t.

What do I bring?

Here is what her question shook loose. For more than two decades, a corporate benefits program quietly did an enormous amount of work I rarely had to think about, and life insurance is a good example. At Wells, I could pay a little more each paycheck to multiply what my family would receive if I ever got hit by the proverbial bus. It was standard, automatic, built in. Step away from that structure and those pieces do not naturally rebuild themselves.

We had never needed to think hard about life insurance at this stage until two things landed close together earlier this year. My husband’s own twenty-year term life policy was ending, with a renewal premium set to jump by an obnoxious amount, and at the same time I was losing my corporate coverage. That was the prompt. Thankfully we know we do not need as much coverage as we once did, since we’ve been saving for our boys’ college and our own retirement. Also, we know we don’t need to sign up for another twenty-year term policy, because we both have many good working years ahead of us (God willing) and we should have our mortgage paid off much sooner. But there are real questions I cannot un-ask now: what would my husband actually need if something happened to me, and what would I need if something happened to him?

How do I move forward?

So, with more time on my hands than I usually get, I am in active conversations with a couple of the big investment firms. I started those talks partly for other reasons, but life insurance keeps surfacing. Of course, I’m also getting the inevitable upsell to long-term care insurance, but I am not ready to sign anything on the long-term care front. The life insurance conversation, though, is one I am glad to be having with a professional, and it is opening up bigger questions about what my husband and I want further down the road, decisions I would rather make thoughtfully now than scramble through later.

This is my experience, and if some familiar structure has always caught you, a job, a benefits package, a role you have carried for years, you may not see everything it was quietly holding until you step out from under it. The stillness is what finally let me see those threads clearly enough to choose which ones to re-stitch myself.

Come sit with me in the space between. Loose Ends lands every Wednesday. Real talk from the unfinished, one honest moment at a time.

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