Is this the beginning of the end of our van? Part 2

So where did I leave you in part 1? Oh yeah, we had to get the van recovered to somewhere safe and to someone we trusted and get away from the family of the other driver.

As I had said previously the family of the other driver originally wanted to go outside of insurance and had brought a mechanic who seemed to think it was a straightforward fix, a one day jobby no problems! Before that I brought a video of the damage to the owner of our local garage who we trusted and he had said it is either completely fixable for less than a grand, or it’s a disaster. I sent the same video to my Uncle Ervine in Ireland, he said the same: it could be completely fine, but if that impact has damaged the structure of the van it’s a write off. Both my uncle and our mechanic said there was to way to know until they could actually look at it in person, but the family’s mechanic looked at it in person and instantly said it was fine.

So in my head we have dropped the van off at our trusted mechanic and tomorrow morning he will call me with a reasonable price to repair and we can contact the insurance company tell them how cheap it is, get them to pay to fix it and we will all be on our merry way. So we are at my sister’s and I eat for the first time in four days, because I’m trusting it’s all going to be ok, we just need to convince insurance it’s “economical” to fix, everything is going to be fine, that’s what I’m telling myself...

The next morning I wake myself up crying, I have got a bad feeling, but I’m just so tired and so drained and so deeply sad that this has all happened to us. Another night of no sleep, I’m like a zombie. Philly hasn’t slept a wink he has to go to work, we both feel like absolute shadows of ourselves, but are anticipating the garage to call us with good news so we can start the battle to get the van repaired. That morning I am in contact with school and the kids about their A-Level results, that distracts me for a while. Then I drive into town to run some errands, I softly cried the whole way there in my little courtesy van. I cried in the bank, I cried in the coffee shop, I cried in Tescos. But gentle cries, tears of exhaustion and sadness from everything we had experienced.

That afternoon I’m hanging out with my niece when I get the phone call from the garage. “Keely it’s not good news”. At first I think oh oh, the van has hit another vehicle while he tried to move it (we nearly hit another vehicle when unloading it at the garage). But no… it’s the damage, it’s worse than we thought. At this point I say to my niece, “why don’t you put on another episode of the cartoon” I can tell this is not a good conversation, I already feel churning in the pit of my stomach. Do you remember how adamant the family were that we didn’t need a second opinion after their fix? Now we know why eh!

I’m going to try and explain this to you all to the best of my layman ability. The damage to the wheel, like driving shaft, suspension etc. all those types of things is an easy fix and not too expensive for parts and labour. He can’t get it up on the ramp for full inspection until that is sorted because its currently undriveable. However what he can tell from down on the ground based on his inspection is that the structure the van is built upon (I don’t know what word it was) is out of line by 1mm, and apparently 1mm may not sound like a lot, but in mechanical terms it can be catastrophic. He can’t tell how catastrophic until its up on the ramp. So until it’s on the ramp he can't tell if it’s just a very expensive fix, or not fixable at all. He said I can pay to get it drivable to get it up on the ramp to see the full extent, but he doesn’t want to take my money off me when ultimately he thinks the insurance company are going to call it a write off either way.

He says I need to think long and hard about this and come to terms with the fact that this is most likely going to be classified as a write off. I tell him I will talk to Philly and call him back to see if we want him to fix the wheel or take his advice and accept reality. So I hang up. I can see my niece is entranced in the TV (a girl after my own heart) and I hear my sister in the office on a video meeting, I walk up the stairs out of earshot and eye shot of them both and I collapse in a heap on the floor and cry the deepest heaviest cry I’ve done in years. I wept, it was Biblical. I was so sad I was in physical pain, I felt like an Irish Banshee wailing at the loss of our van.

I hear the TV episode credits so I stand up and smile at my niece, she wants to play the Wii, so we turn on Just Dance and I am dancing to Britney Spears Toxic with a Wii remote while hot tears flow down my cheeks, every time my niece turns around I smile and do the dance moves exuberantly, then she turns away and cry some more. I take her to the park and we play Pokemon on the way. She’s happy, I’m happy to be with her, I love her so much. The second she leaves my side at the park I fall to pieces. I’m sobbing on the park bench like an absolute crazy person. Philly calls me, I fill him in. We agree we will just have to tell insurance we can’t get a quote for damage as we had hoped and see where we go from there. I don’t even remember what happened the rest of that day, I felt completely numb. I know it was another sleepless night, another day of eating little and crying a lot.

The next morning I have to call the garage and let him know not to waste time fixing the wheel, we will talk to insurance and see what we can do. I leave the house to make the phone calls, I know I can’t pretend not to be deeply sad, I need to allow myself to feel this. The garage agrees to look after the van and keep it there, he will bill insurance for storage. The insurance agree to get their own engineer to inspect the damage. She keeps insisting that they will collect it and take it to storage to be inspected, and I explain for the millionth time why they can’t take our van. I beg her to help me, to understand our situation, to actually put it on record what I’m saying so I don’t have to keep reliving this with every new person I speak to. I apologise numerous times for crying, “I’m sorry, but I’m just so sad, this van is our everything, all our savings, the last 9 months of our life, our home, our future plans” She says I don’t need to apologise she understands, she will see what she can do. She comes back to me and says that their engineer can come to the garage where the van is stored and he can inspect it and then we will take it from there. I thank her for not trying to take my home. I tell her I want to be there when he comes to inspect it so I can show him our beautiful conversion. That was on Friday, the inspector isn’t coming until Thursday.

So now we wait. Everything is still so uncertain. We are currently just trying to anticipate all the possible outcomes that come from this, and very few of them are desirable. All because someone drove into our parked vehicle at full speed on a long straight road. It doesn’t make sense, none of this makes sense, but some day it will. Some day we will look back and understand why this all had to happen.