My family  has been incredibly lucky over the past year. I know it is hard to believe that I would say something like that after losing my brother, my grandpa, my uncle, the unexpected death of my grandma’s sister, and the four year old son of a cousin in the past six years. Honestly, it seems like it has been much longer than six years when all of this tragedy started…

I can still hear the swish of my uncle’s wind pants coming down the hallway at work, my brother’s boisterous and infection laugh, and the my grandpa barreling down the hallways at work not caring if we are in an important meeting or on a phone call.  At the time, these little interruptions would sometimes irritate me as it meant a break in my work but now I miss these interruptions tremendously.

My first brush with death was when I was pregnant with my daughter when I was 18 years old. My grandpa who had suffered through years of heart conditions, lung issues, eventually died of cancer of the lungs that was detected when they did his autopsy. He was too young, just 61 years old. He was sick for so long but he held on as long as he could. My daughter was born just a day before he would have turned 62 about 10 days after he passed.

So why do I feel lucky? 

I have so many guardian angels watching over my family, which has been apparent in the past year as we have narrowly escaped numerous additional tragedies. I like to think that one of all of my passed on loved ones are watching over our family.

Recently a drunk driver plowed into the building my son was in. They normally are in the exact spot in the back of the building doing workouts where the drunk driver completely immersed his entire car into the building. The exact spot. There was eleven teenage boys in that building that day that would have been there had not one of the kids had a jammed finger. Instead, the instructor decided to adjust their workout so he could participate, which meant no weights at that time.

My oldest daughter, just having her license for a few months, was involved in an accident where she was hit on her driver’s side. She walked away with no visible injuries.

Another child was a witness to a crime last summer, which for legal reasons, I can’t divulge at this time. Let’s just say, thank God, she was just a witness and not the actual victim of the crime. Sometimes made her run away before she could be victimized.

When I think about how many times that we could have lost my brother before his untimely death, I believe we are incredibly lucky he survived as long as he did. The umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck at birth.  When he was about four, he almost drown in my grandparent’s pool, riding his trike into the pool and being submerged during a family gathering. He rolled and totaled a van the very first day he received his driver’s license, escaping complete injury for him and his unbuckled passenger. Then there was the time that he was trying to outrun the police and instead of shooting him dead, an older officer had a feeling that something possibly wasn’t mentally right with him and urged the trigger happy younger officers to use non-lethal force. He escaped death that day by just being tased and pepper sprayed. On a side note, he always told us being tasered was much more preferable to the pepper spray.

When you think about all he went through and those are the just the incidents that I actually know about, there are possibly others, I feel incredibly lucky that he made it to 28 years old.

Maybe, just maybe, one of my passed on loved ones is watching over my children, which is not just luck, it is being cared for and watched over…I like to think that though…and if so, my family is definitely giving them a full workout.