I want to tell you about the day I cried after paying off a debt. These were not tears of joy or relief. I was not looking forward to what having that money freed up could do for my budget. I was crying, tears of loss and grief, as one final connection was broken.

I’ve said a number of times during the adoption process that logically understanding something is not the same as emotionally accepting it. On that day, the logical part of my mind knew the loss had come nearly a year before, it knew that we needed the money that had been going toward that debt to go toward other things. Logically understanding all of that did nothing to stop the tears.

What am I talking about? I’m talking about the day I paid off the Care Credit debt we had taken on to pay for our Australian Shepherd’s intestinal surgery. The card that they had charged his final care and cremation to.

My Moree angel had died nearly a year before, after his surgery site when septic. It had been a sudden, heart breaking loss, that still causes me to tear up over 2.5 years later.

And there had been anger and frustration about the bill before that- there I was paying a vet bill for a dog I no longer had. How depressing is that?

And yet, the day I made the last payment, I cried. It was like losing my boy all over again. It did not make logical sense, but somehow, that bill was like one last piece of him. If I was still paying for him, he could not really be gone, could he?

And then, I was no longer paying. He had not been in my daily life for almost a year, and then, with that last payment, he was no longer in my monthly life, either. Gone. Just absolutely gone. And I was devastated all over again. 

As humans, we attach emotions to just about everything in our lives- and that includes our money and our debts. Many people who have successfully gotten themselves out of debt find themselves drifting and at a loss now that their money doesn’t have a prescribed destination. Some people even dig themselves right back into that hole, because they aren’t quite certain how to cope in a debt free world.

 

There are no right or wrong emotions. Sometimes it can be hard to be excited about paying off debt. Sometimes we feel no guilt at taking on new debt. And sometimes, instead of feeling relief and happiness at getting rid of debt, we feel a deep sense of loss.

There is nothing wrong with that. You feel what you feel. The important part, as in so many things in life, is how you act.

I had no idea I would react to paying off Moree’s vet bill in the way I did. But that sadness did not throw any wrenches into our life because we had a plan. Like with all things, we had looked at a lot of different options for what to do with that money once it no longer had to go to Care Credit, and we knew, before the last payment was made, what would happen with that money the next month.

 

Money is an emotional subject. Accept that. Embrace it. And have a plan in place. It really does make everything easier, even losing your dog a second time.