## The Investment Account
After the house sold and the estate was in the final stages, there was an accounting process that involved more paperwork than I’d expected and less drama than I’d feared.
The investment account had done slightly better than expected over the months of the process — markets move during probate, as during everything else, and the timing had been relatively favorable. The legitimate expenses — attorney fees, realtor commission, administrative costs — had come to somewhat less than originally projected.
The final numbers, as I’ve mentioned, were approximately one hundred thirty-eight thousand dollars each for Vanessa and me after the sixty thousand specific bequest. These were estimates for most of the process and then became real numbers on a document that arrived in my mailbox.
I didn’t have a dramatic response to the money when it arrived. I’d been bracing for some large feeling, some sense of the transaction completing something, but what I mostly felt was ordinary. The number looked like a number. It sat in an account I’d opened for it and then I figured out what to do with it, which took several months and involved talking to a financial advisor, which is not a very interesting story.
What I kept thinking about was not the money but the math. The estate was structured so that after the sixty thousand came off the top, the remainder was split equally. Vanessa and I ended up with roughly the same amount, from the remainder. The specific bequest was separate — a recognition, in his words, of something specific, not a larger portion of the whole. He had not dramatically shifted the distribution in my favor. He had added something that was meant to say something, in addition to being something.