That's up to your company's policy. My company has a similar policy with a two-stage award, and you're not entitled to the award for approval if it's approved after you leave.
Do you have any former colleagues/friends at the company who could get you a copy of the policy?
I also wrote a lot of abstracts for a large cable television equipment manufacturer. In some cases, Ididn't even write the application but they've continued to pay me both the filing award and patent award fees. I haven't worked there since 2010 but they're still paying me as an employee.
1. No, you are not entitled to the final reward (almost certainly).
Maybe your employment contract is different than other companies I have heard of, but this ought to be just like any other bonus (referral bonus, holiday bonus, etc.). When you terminate your employment, you are no longer eligible for employee bonuses.
The company most likely was banking on most employees never collecting the patent granting "reward". Like equity, it's a carrot to motivate/manipulate you, not a sincere "thank you".
Entitled is a funny word with two senses here. One is "Do I have a claim for compensation which the legal system will back?" and another is "Do I deserve do get paid this money?"
Legal questions are often best answered by a lawyer. The lawyer is going to ask to see the contract you have with your employer about this compensation. I do not have access to this contract, but I have a probabalistic guess for you based on standard practices in the tech industry: you do not, in fact, have a contractual right to payment for the company's patents. They're the company's patents, not your patents -- you signed an IP assignment agreement which made this absolutely, unambiguously clear roughly contemporaneously with starting your job. Your sole guaranteed compensation for any work was your salary. Your company owes you zero dollars and zero cents of remaining salary; they mathed the heck out of that when you stopped working for them and, after that check was cut, you were even. Your company has discretion in awarding your bonuses when you worked there; they're going to exercise their discretion in not awarding you bonuses since you do not work there.
Do you deserve to get paid the money? That's a rather different kettle of fish. To the extent that you're well-educated adult who can understand contracts presented to you in English, none of the above should come as a surprise. To the extent that one thinks that the purpose of the bonus is not incenting future behavior but rather rewarding past behavior, a reasonable argument could be made that since you put in the work you should receive the fruits of it.