Hello, everyone. My name is Linnéa Bridgeman and I am setting this up on behalf of my mother, Eva Bridgeman.
Her car, a 2010 Subaru Impreza that first belonged to my late father, is not just rusting but rotting. After 16 years of harsh Canadian winters and 200k kilometers, she is nearing her end…but we can’t afford to replace it. My mother is a retired widow and I’m disabled with only enough income to get by month-to-month, almost everything I have after bills going to groceries. But as you might tell from the photos, taken when our mechanic swapped out the winter tires, this car is not very safe to drive even now. It could give out at any time, though we hope it will last us until the end of summer. If that happens, our city is not very walkable even ignoring my mother’s age and my disability. Our public transit system isn’t very good, either.
We both hate having to ask for this much help but the past few years have been one financial hit after another. My father died after a many years long battle with cancer. Our dog, Gustav, died in 2024. Our basement had a sewage flood a few months later in late 2024, which insurance luckily covered most of the costs of. Our roof needed to be entirely redone last summer (2025), which insurance did not cover and cost $6k. Our senior cat Lavi who was with us for almost 19 years (I miss her every day) passed in early January (thank you once again to all my friends who helped with that unexpected $600 bill). We just had our crumbling chimney removed which was another $2k. The roof replacement killed any savings we collectively (as in myself, my mother, and my brother, who is between jobs while working on his Masters) had and given the currency economy and the Canadian used car market, we simply cannot afford this on our own.
My mother is not looking for a brand new vehicle. She’s keeping an eye out online and at local dealerships for a used car, 5-6 years, but hopefully without an insane amount of kilometers clocked. The tentative goal of $10,000 will cover the cost of a down payment and hopefully a few months of following payments while we work on our own savings; the full cost of one of these used cars ranges from $15k-$20k. Anything at all helps tremendously and we would be so, so grateful. If we can do this…my father’s ashes have been sitting in our living room for several years. We’d like to finally drive him up north, to his favorite lake where he loved to go fishing every summer, and finally spread his ashes out the way he wanted. With the car in such poor condition, we haven’t been able to do this for him yet.
Also, for full transparency: I may be writing and posting this on her behalf as she is not very tech-savvy, but all the funds will go directly into my mother’s bank account and not to me. Everything from the GFM page to the bank is all in her name.
“Why go through a dealership?” There has been a huge influx of autotheft cases in Canada, particularly in Ontario and the GTA. My mother is understandably wary about going through Kijiji, facebook marketplace (though nobody in our household has a facebook) or used car lots that aren’t as diligent about checking where the car came from.
“Can you not get a finance plan through your bank?” We have a mortgage and cannot get a car loan. Also, Canadian banks do not finance cars that are five years or older.
About our income: my mother receives a widowers pension and as well as old age/retirement, but most of that goes towards the house mortgage and bills alongside the rent and utilities I pay. We even rent our spare room downstairs to help make ends meet and still barely have enough to get by as it is.
I just want to add as well that my mother is the kind of woman who has let people rob her again and again, because she wants so very badly to believe in the best sides of people and that they will do the right thing. My great-aunt stole upwards of 30k when my great-grandfather died, money that was meant to be used for my mom to personally fly his ashes to Sweden and ensure, with her own eyes, that he was buried next to his first wife. What did this woman do? She sent him home through air mail without even telling my mother, to say nothing of her behavior leading up to this in the last months of his life and the immediate aftermath.
That’s not the only instance of such a thing happening, but it is the most personal and one that still hurts. My mother was very close to her grandfather and was the one cleaning his apartment, helping him go shopping, to his medical appointments, etc. When his health began to fail he had her promise she would take him home. That she couldn’t do this devastated her.
All this to say, my mother gives so much of herself and despite her bountiful kindness, things keep going wrong in her life (and even in all of that, she still insists on finding the good in it all and seeing these hardships as ‘life lessons learned’). Please, please help me make something easy for her for once. Any kindness and support, whether through donating or sharing this, would mean the world to her.
More photos of the rusting/rotting below:
