“What will you do now?”
“Live. Simply live.”
And that was exactly what I did.
Days turned into weeks. Weeks into months. Faith tried to contact me three more times during the first month after the hearing—text messages that oscillated between pleas and accusations. I ignored them all.
Eventually, she stopped trying.
Audrey visited me every two weeks. She told me that Faith and Grant had had to move to a smaller apartment because they couldn’t afford the rent of their previous house. That the children asked about me, but Faith told them that Grandma was sick and couldn’t have visitors.
Another lie in her collection.
“Doesn’t it make you sad, Aunt? They’re your grandchildren.”
“It makes me sad that they are being raised by someone who values money more than family. But I can’t save them from that. I can only save myself.”
My life in the apartment became a comfortable, predictable routine. I woke up early. I drank coffee watching the sunrise over the city. I went for walks in the park where I had made friends—other women my age who had also chosen independence over the false comfort of depending on their children.
One of them, Brenda Williams, told me her own story one afternoon while we were having tea in my apartment.
“Her son had tried to put her in assisted living to take her house. She had fought legally,” she said, “and now lived in the same building as me, three floors up.”
“Our children grew up in a time when everything was easy for them,” she told me. “They don’t understand the value of sacrifice because they never had to make any. And when they see that we have something they don’t, they don’t think about working to get it. They think about how to take it from us.”
She was right. We had worked so hard to give them a better life that we forgot to teach them to value the effort behind everything.
With the money from the sale of my house, after paying all the legal expenses and establishing my investments, I was left with $155,000 well protected. The interest generated approximately $600 monthly, which added to my pension of $1,200 gave me $1,800 a month—more than enough to live comfortably.
