Day 257

Before Constance was born, my brother Nick told me that he always considered me to be a lucky person. I was stunned by the assertion. Contrarily, I thought I combatted my shortcomings and bad draws with my relentless work ethic. Before I met Constance, I was the most determined person I knew. Nick cited examples such as the time I was road tripping between desert towns and had just enough gas to roll on fumes to the next gas station. Hearing his earnest assertion, I realized I’d done a good job of isolating people from the hardships and curveballs I’d experienced.

Constance was exceptionally unlucky. The chance of dying at age eight in the United States in 2018 is minuscule. Just as unlikely is the chance of my only child dying at age eight. Yet, here we are—unlucky as we are persistent. While it happened to Constance, we are all broken and drowning in the wake of the tragic loss.

If you decide what to worry about based on the odds that it will occur, you wouldn’t worry that your only child would die at age eight. Instead, you would worry about far more likely things—like cancer.

I used to tell myself that rare but horrible things were unlikely to happen to me because the probability was low and I wasn’t that special. I told myself that any fear I had that outliers would occur to me was a form of narcissism because incredibly good and bad things just don’t happen to most people. Heart-breakingly, Constance and I aren’t most people. We are exceptionally unlucky.

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