PART 8 – I Finally Stopped Trying to Guess What Grandma Wanted and Faced the Only Thing I Could Honestly Say About Her Check

By then, I had begun to understand the limits of what I knew.

It wasn't a pleasant realization.

I wanted a complete explanation.

I wanted to know why Grandma had written the checks and what she expected the family to do with them.

But I couldn't answer those questions by studying the amount.

Six million dollars told me how much she had written on my check.

It didn't tell me why.

The bank's findings answered a different question.

The account existed.

The signature matched the record.

The check appeared consistent with a valid transaction.

Those details mattered, but they didn't explain the decision behind it.

The bank still had to complete its verification and approval process.

Until then, I had to be careful about treating the money as available.

That was the practical side of the situation.

The personal side was more difficult.

I had to accept that my understanding of Grandma was incomplete.

I had known her as my grandmother for years.

I had recognized her handwriting without hesitation.

I had never expected to find myself questioning what I knew about her because of a check.

Yet that was exactly where I had ended up.

I thought about the other recipients again.

My parents.

Eric.

Olivia.

Aunt Diane.

Uncle Martin.

The fact that Grandma had included all of them seemed important.

I simply didn't know what it meant.

I couldn't decide that the checks were intended to repair something in the family.

I couldn't decide that she was trying to reward us.

I couldn't decide that she wanted us to make any particular choice.

There was no evidence for those conclusions.

I had to leave the meaning open.

That was difficult for someone who spent his working life interpreting words.

I was used to believing that enough attention could reveal the intention behind a sentence.

But the check wasn't a passage in a novel.

It was a real financial document, and my grandmother was a real person whose motives I couldn't read from a distance.

I needed more than interpretation.

I needed facts.

So I returned to the facts I had.

The bank had not dismissed the check.

Edward had explained why a transaction of that size required additional examination.

The process could take several business days.

And Grandma had given checks to six members of the family, including me.

That was enough to establish where things stood.

It wasn't enough to tell me where they were going.

I could wait for the bank to complete its work.

I could avoid making plans based on money I couldn't yet access.

I could resist telling myself that I understood my grandmother's intentions when I didn't.

None of those choices answered the larger questions.

They did, however, keep me from adding confusion to an already confusing situation.

I realized I had been treating uncertainty as a problem I needed to solve immediately.

It wasn't always something that could be solved by thinking harder.

Sometimes the honest answer was simply that I didn't know.

That answer frustrated me.

It also gave me something solid to stand on.

I didn't know why Grandma had made the decision.

I didn't know what the other recipients thought about it.

And I didn't know when the bank would finish the remaining steps.

But I knew what Edward had told me.

I knew what I had seen.

And I knew I had to wait before drawing conclusions.

For the moment, that was enough.

The check remained a check.

The signature remained familiar.

The amount remained extraordinary.

And the questions remained unanswered.

I would have to face them one at a time, as the facts allowed.

Click here to continue reading: PART 9: I Had Always Thought of Grandma as an Ordinary Woman, Until Her Check Forced Me to Question What I Had Never Bothered to Ask