right, that the odds thirty-eight years ago of us ever getting married were pretty close to 0 percent, if not actually 0 percent.
But yet, we did meet and marry. In this chaotic universe of so many people and innumerable paths crossing randomly for brief moments of time, our life threads touched and fused together. If the odds of us meeting and getting married were 0 percent when we were babies, as Josh and I both believe, then how did we in fact meet and get married? How can that impossible occurrence be reconciled with the numbers? Is it as simple as that our union is an example of how numbers mean squat, that indeed our union is proof positive of the worthlessness of statistics? If I ever thought that to be true, I don’t anymore.
If I didn’t believe in the numbers that tell me I will likely not die when I walk out the door or board a plane, if I didn’t believe in the numbers that tell me my children will likely not be shot by some madman invading their school, then I would never leave our home, and would certainly never let my children leave, either. We go to bed every night expecting the sun to rise in the morning because based on the rules of probability, this is what will happen. We save for our children’s college educations and our own retirements because based on the odds, we expect our children to grow up healthy and go to college, and yes, we expect ourselves to age and enjoy retirement. Everything we do in our lives, we do based on the likelihood of something happening; it’s called planning.
While those of us who have advanced cancer would like to ignore the statistics that pertain to whether we will live or die from our disease and to say that numbers mean squat, it would be hypocritical to do so, because even as we live with our disease, we must in fact continue to live, and with living comes the need to plan. I must still believe in the numbers; otherwise, I wouldn’t—couldn’t—do anything; I wouldn’t cross the street; I wouldn’t agree to undergo exhausting treatments that statistically have proven to be at least somewhat effective; I wouldn’t plan birthday parties or vacations. I do all these things because despite the improbability of my getting sick in the first place, I still expect the earth to rotate, the universe to operate based on certain rules, and the outcomes that the statistics predict to actually happen. I cannot pick and choose which numbers to live by because I don’t like the predicted outcome.
But odds are not prophecy, and what is expected to happen sometimes doesn’t happen. Plans fall apart. Children grow up and show no interest in college despite their parents’ best efforts. Adults die, leaving their retirement funds untapped. Madmen invade schools and slaughter the innocent. People with Stage I cancer years later experience a recurrence and die from metastatic cancer, even though the odds were heavily in their favor at diagnosis, and people with Stage IV cancer somehow live far longer than anyone would have expected. And maybe someday the earth will be struck by a giant asteroid that will obliterate all life as we know it. And when those unlikely events happen, the probability of their occurrence becomes 100 percent.
Josh has a not-quite-immobilizing fear of flying. Even so, he has a morbid fascination with air disasters, and so he (and therefore I) have watched endless hours of air disaster shows on National Geographic and the Smithsonian Channel, shows with C-class actors reenacting the last harrowing minutes of a commercial airliner’s flight before it crashes into the side of a mountain, a quiet neighborhood, or the ocean, and the investigative efforts to uncover what went wrong. Sometimes there are happy endings, in which by some miracle the pilots manage to save passengers and crew. But that rarely happens.
Everyone knows that flying is statistically significantly safer than driving, that given the number of people who fly around the world and the few accidents there are, flying is the safest form of travel. Of course, as Josh and I watch an episode, we both are thinking that my odds of beating Stage IV colon cancer are much better than the odds of those people on that flight living more than two minutes; anything is better than a 0 percent likelihood of survival, the odds for those doomed people. I’ve