PART 3: “The Debt That Followed Me Home”

By Luna Mace

After the funeral, after the flowers had wilted and the last mourners had awkwardly whispered their condolences and left, I thought maybe the worst was over. I was wrong.
The coffin wasn’t the end. The grief wasn’t the end. The work wasn’t the end. And the bills… oh, the bills—they were like a shadow that followed me home, crouching in corners, waiting for me to blink before pouncing.

It wasn’t just the funeral debt. That was a visible enemy, a figure with a name and a total stamped on paper in red ink: $11,842. That number became my daily nightmare. It sat on the counter, on my dresser, in my dreams, mocking me. But there were other costs nobody warns you about when you bury a parent at seventeen. There were opportunity costs, invisible but just as crushing.

My friends went back to their lives, buzzing with excitement over college applications, car loans, spring break plans. They posted selfies from campus tours and summer programs like tiny flags proclaiming, “Look, my life is going forward.” I scrolled past, thumb hovering, trying not to scream at their carelessness. Some days, I almost did.

I had no time for spring break. I had no time for internships, for volunteering, for sleep. I had shifts at the diner and at the daycare, babysitting screaming toddlers for $10 an hour. I learned to become efficient at exhaustion, to smile while my arms ached from folding laundry or cleaning tables, to nod politely while people told me, “You’re so mature for your age.” Maturity is overrated. Exhaustion isn’t.

How Work Became My Full-Time Education

High school is supposed to be a warm-up for life. I should have been learning literature, biology, algebra. Instead, I became a full-time employee of grief.

I learned how to negotiate with landlords when the rent was late, how to stretch a grocery budget so thin that you could see through it, how to keep a smile on your face while explaining to customers why their latte took five minutes longer than usual. Every interaction was a reminder that the world was running on money, and I was running on hope and desperation.

It was a strange kind of apprenticeship: life lessons wrapped in exhaustion. I learned the math of survival better than anything I learned in algebra class. If a 12-hour week at the diner brought in $360, and my babysitting job was $120 for 15 hours, how long until I could chip away at the next funeral payment? I calculated the cost per hour of grief and life in a notebook I never showed anyone.

Even when I slept, I was dreaming of numbers, invoices, and receipts. Sometimes, I woke up clutching the calculator like a lifebuoy.

College, or the Life That Slipped Away

I had been naive enough to think that once the funeral was over, I could go back to “normal teenage life.” That was the cruelest joke of all. College, which had been this shiny carrot dangling in front of me for years, suddenly felt like a privilege reserved for people who weren’t crushed under the combined weight of death and financial ruin.

I never filled out the last of my applications. I never toured the campus. I never applied for scholarships or student loans because, honestly, I didn’t have the bandwidth to play pretend. Every time I opened a brochure or clicked on a scholarship form, I felt my chest tighten. The words on the page mocked me: “Opportunities await you,” they said. “Your potential is limitless.” I wanted to reply, “Yeah, if I had a silver spoon and not a funeral bill for my teenage mother to pay off.”

The world was moving forward, but I was trapped in a holding pattern, suspended between the life I had and the one I’d been promised. And every time I thought I might get a breath, another invoice or bill would appear, reminding me that survival is a full-time job and grief is a full-time tax.

The Social Divide

It’s strange how people can look at you and not see the chaos behind your eyes. Teachers thought I was quiet, responsible, maybe even ambitious. Classmates assumed I was just “helping out at home,” as if that could explain why I didn’t join clubs, didn’t go to parties, didn’t have a driver’s license, didn’t even have a weekend to call my own.

No one asked what it felt like to spend every evening cleaning up after strangers’ messes or comforting toddlers while your own heart was breaking. No one asked what it felt like to spend a Saturday afternoon at the funeral home negotiating costs like a lawyer, watching your father crumble into helpless tears, knowing you had no choice but to step up.

And even when they did notice, there’s only so much empathy you can get before people stop listening. Grief becomes a background noise to everyone else. Your life shrinks, your responsibilities grow, and the world keeps asking, “Why don’t you do more?”

The Burden of the Invisible Work

Everyone talks about paying the funeral bill. No one talks about the emotional labor, the paperwork, the endless follow-ups, the calls to insurance companies, the nights spent crying over forms you don’t understand. I became the family administrator, the mediator, the accountant, the emotional buffer.

Some nights, I’d sit on my bed staring at the ceiling, trying to decide whether I was more exhausted physically or mentally. There was no way to measure it. Each day brought a new type of fatigue. There was grief fatigue, financial fatigue, work fatigue, social fatigue. And the worst kind? The fatigue of knowing that even if you survived it all, the life you had imagined had been stolen.

And yet, I kept going. Because what choice did I have?

The Cost of Freedom

People always tell you college is about freedom. Freedom to explore, to meet new people, to make mistakes, to dream big. I had none of that. My freedom had been mortgaged along with my mother’s coffin. I had “responsibility” instead — an unpaid bill that grew with interest, a parent still grieving, a body that needed to eat and a mind that needed a break it would never get.

Every night, I would scroll through scholarship emails and financial aid reminders like a cruel form of entertainment. I knew I didn’t have the time to chase them. I knew I didn’t have the money to attend. I knew I’d be working instead of learning, calculating survival instead of history, biology, or calculus.

I’d spend twelve hours a day doing labor that had nothing to do with my dreams, only survival. And yet I was learning something no one else in my class was: the brutal arithmetic of life when death comes too early.

The Emotional Toll

It wasn’t just work. It wasn’t just finances. It was grief, coiled tight around every aspect of my being. The loss of my mother followed me everywhere. Grocery shopping, school, work, the bus, the diner, the daycare — her absence was like a stain on the air, a whisper I couldn’t ignore.

Some days, I would cry in the bathroom at work. Some nights, I would cry into the pillow I shared with Dad. Some mornings, I’d cry on the bus, clinging to the straps like my life depended on it.

And the cruelest part? The world kept pretending like it wasn’t happening. People smiled at me in the hallways, teachers nodded at my homework submissions, classmates waved. And I waved back, because showing anything else would require energy I didn’t have.

The Realization

I realized one night, after working a double shift and coming home to Dad asleep on the couch, that my life had been split into two timelines.

In one timeline, I was at a college campus, meeting friends, learning, laughing. I was seventeen and free. I had a car. I had weekends to myself. I had hopes that didn’t come with interest payments.

In the other timeline, I was seventeen and broke. I had bills. I had responsibilities. I had grief. I had the knowledge that some dreams don’t survive real life.

I didn’t know which timeline was worse. The first one I would never have. The second one I lived every day.

The Long Road Ahead

Even now, as I write this, I know the road isn’t over. There are more bills. More work. More compromises. More grief. And maybe, someday, college will happen. Maybe, someday, I’ll get that car. Maybe I’ll get the chance to live the life I was supposed to have.

But right now, my life is a ledger.
Debits: grief, labor, lost opportunities.
Credits: survival, resilience, knowledge I wouldn’t trade for anything — though I’d love to.

And while I can’t reclaim the years stolen by death and debt, I can keep moving.
I can keep surviving.
I can keep telling my story.

Because if nothing else, that’s mine.
No funeral director, no overpriced casket, no system designed to crush families like ours, can take that away.

After everything I’ve shared about the debt and chaos that comes with funerals, I learned there are ways to make the costs a little less soul-crushing. If you need an affordable, quality casket without being ripped off, check out Discount Caskets.

Even in grief, you shouldn’t have to bankrupt yourself. Click the link and see options that won’t make saying goodbye even harder on your walle