A 3% Chance

“See that far mountain range in the distance, the one just beyond the first?” 

“Yes,” I answered serenely. 

I took a deep breath and wanted to capture this mesmerizing view in my memory forever, like caging an animus that could never be caught. 

The tranquility of the moment sent shivers down my spine. 

Poignant yet surreal. 

My thoughts branding the imprint like eager iron on sizzling skin. 

“That’s Canada.  You can see Canada from here,” he finished – his breath chasing the words from his lips with the excited leg kicking of a toddler. 

I was standing behind him on the dock – the creak of boards and whispers of swaying wakes reminding me of a secret world hidden beneath our feet – and his shoulders dipped ever so slightly as he said this last sentence to me, as if uttering those words put him at peace or lifted that great invisible weight of the world from his aching bones. 

Then he turned to me, and his smile was a thing from legends – a reflection of Dionysus emerging from the underworld back among the living. 

His bright red hair fanning out in the dying light, a crimson crown flowing wildly and free.  Lightning eyes shrouded in an enigmatic swagger, hinting of buried mysteries untangling in the eager tendrils of dusk. 

He looked like what he was in that moment. 

A Phoenix.  Reborn. 

One of the few that can honestly say he had outrun the reaper.  Looked the dark one in the face and laughed.  

Second chances.  They can do that to you.  Remind you that every step you take is tip toeing eternally across shallow graves yet hewn. 

Him and I were standing alone on the dock, each wrapped in a reclusive cloak of silence that only quiet men know. 

Belittled by the yawning expanse of the lake stretching out it’s curling fingers before us wider than the emptiness between stars, solitary yet driven.  Driven by the possibility hanging from the gaping jaws of a wilderness unknown, withdrawn and still enchanted from the constant clutches of the technological dragons of the world. 

Sharing a moment.  Sharing our lives.  Sharing a breath. 

The absence of speech a conversation in itself among two chiseled souls locked behind impenetrable walls of protection and hidden emotion. 

This is how guarded men relate.  They don’t talk.  They simply feel their way through… 

He nodded at me, and I returned it in tune. 

It was a silent nod, a nod that acknowledged some things transcended words.  We each had fended off our own demons and were granted this small reprieve. 

Him and I were alike. 

Him and I were survivors. 

— 

Where we stood was magical for me. 

It’s an island that has shaped me mostly from afar, but when I get the gift of gracing its shores with my own bare feet – toes crunching shoreline glacier-smoothed gravel and pungent pines tickling my nostrils – memories unfold and stories are told.  Many are happy, and many more will come as I continue to write. 

But what’s joyous for some, can be devastating to others. 

Let me explain… 

The island itself is a story, but it’s ending is always the same.  What begins with a question mark, eventually concludes with a pitfall, that gaping chasm that can never be outrun in life. 

A death. 

Another game piece removed from the chessboard of survival.  What gives must eventually take.  And the wheel keeps spinning… on and on. 

— 

We had just walked from the other side of the island to catch the sunset on the Northern shore.  The man I was with was my Uncle’s best friend. 

I stress was, because my Uncle is dead. 

You see, in the late 90’s my uncle bought a piece of land on a remote island in the Northern tip of Idaho that was off the grid.  He was a newly minted 55-year-old retiree from teaching, and this was going to be his next project.  Everyone told him not to do it, but he did it anyway. 

My uncle was never one to listen, nor follow those who stepped in line.  He always beat to a different drum. 

As soon as he began work (remember this is an island on a lake, so everything must be shipped in on a pontoon boat), he met his new best friend. 

They took to one another right away, as these things should be. 

Well, at least that’s what I’d like to think.  I wasn’t there.  And that place where truth and fiction intermingle, isn’t for me to decide.  Because I’ve pieced this all together from conversations and stories of old. 

But the truth has a way of rising to the surface, in even a yarn’s tallest of tales. 

So they built the cabin together.  Shared the lake life as much as they could.  Became family all over again, my uncle and his wife and his best friend and his wife.  Endless summers triumphed.  Kids growing old. 

Two couples that had been through much and thought they’d seen it all. 

Then one day the news came. 

My uncle’s friend had cancer. 

It was bad.  Ugly.  There’s never a good way to tell someone they are about to die. 

They gave him a 3% chance to live, and even that was a generous prognosis. 

But he began treatment anyway, why not throw one last hail Mary in the dying seconds of the fourth quarter even as they made plans for his death.  What did he have to lose?  He was a dead man walking as one could ever be. 

The treatment took its toll quickly.  Within weeks he looked like a shriveled corpse grasping at life like arthritic fingers fumbling with string, while each day struck another nail in the coffin. 

It was only a matter of time they said.  Weeks.  This is what a terminal sentence means. 

Yet, as you’ve already surmised, the miracle happened.  They did a final surgery that wasn’t supposed to work, but somehow it did. 

Hope crystalized into the priceless commodity of a beating heart – more time. 

Slowly he recovered. 

Slowly he picked back up the pieces of his life. 

The game would play one. 

I can only wonder at what it might have felt like to be falling over the edge and then suddenly pulled back among the living?  So few of us ever get a true second chance. 

Yet unfortunately, we don’t’ get to make the rules. 

Then only a few years later, a different news came, still on the heels and shock of such miraculous good luck to defy impossible odds. 

My Uncle had cancer. 

It was spreading quickly, but there was hope for treatment.  Yet as we all know, hope is sometimes only worth the paper it is written upon. 

Four months after his diagnosis he was dead. 

The sudden turn of events couldn’t’ have been more devastating. 

What must have that been like for his widow?  Having the tables turned so cruelly?  Spending the prior years preparing for a friend’s death and how she would help his widow.  And so shortly thereafter, experiencing the nightmare of sitting in their very shoes. 

The script flipped.  A horror story made real. 

It hasn’t been pretty watching this play out over the recent years.  You never know how it’s going to go.  Will the survivor persevere or fall into pieces? 

It’s been pieces for now.  I’m still hopeful that the future will be brighter than the past.  But we all know what hope is worth. 

Its value depends on the holder. 

Sometimes even the most grounded and intelligent of us can be naïve. 

We always think that life will only continue to get better.  The law of accumulated returns will stretch out in a straight line far off into the sunset of our lives never receding.  Yet the truth is, that for some of us, today will be the best things ever get.  Everyday thereafter, only a shadow of the one before. 

And for a few unfortunates, the end will be ugly – a dire, desolate existence that we one day wake up to wondering how it had ever come to be. 

Hence, it all comes back to a single question:  how much do you personally value your time? 

I’ve never played with the notion of being a widower myself, because I wouldn’t want to.  I value what I have too much to imagine a world in which it were stolen from me. 

The present is a gift I choose to unwrap each and every day. 

Until that day I don’t. 

— 

I feel my legs sway to the creak of the dock and watch him stare off over the water one last time in the dying light, and so many different thoughts are racing through my mind. 

Does he talk to my uncle in his head?  Does he ever wish it should have been him instead?  Is there guilt?  Has the island ever lost its magical touch for him? 

I like to think it hasn’t, because he’s still here with us.  Watching over my uncle’s widow.  Taking care of all that he can in the shadow of our loss. 

Turning the wheel, as the dawn turns new, life moving on. 

He reminds me, standing there on the edge with the flowing red hair, a flaring beacon mnemonic personified, that you can only guess how the final game will play out. 

We don’t like to admit how much we don’t know.  We don’t like to acknowledge how little we control. 

Each day is a new gamble. 

Never say never. 

Hug your loved ones often and make the most of what counts. 

A 3% chance, fancy that. 

A 97% certainty beaten. 

Living proof that some miracles can happen. 

-Q-FI 

— 

Have you ever beaten insurmountable odds?  Let’s hear it.