Something Other Than Chance? By Laura J. Oliver

There are those who think serendipitous timing is a matter of chance and those who think nothing is. I’ll bet you have some thoughts on this but let me tell you what happened.

Mike was a laid-back, bear of a man, who wore a pale-blue oxford shirt with khaki pants every day and looked like a stocky Paul Newman. He’d left his job as an editor at Time/Life Books to start The Chesapeake Boatman when I came to work for the magazine as Associate Editor. A kind and generous mentor, Mike put up with a lot from his young, given-to-drama staff–rather like a long-suffering father shepherding a bunch of rowdy adolescents. We made him buy lunch a lot. 

The Boatman was a substantive magazine but struggled for three years in a saturated market. I was delighting in my second week of maternity leave when Mike came to the house to meet my new daughter, and to deliver the news that the magazine had folded. He was closing the office. I grieved for the loss of a job, a boss, and a routine that I loved, but I supplanted those losses with new motherhood, which I loved more.

We lost touch and I never saw Mike again, but 23 years later, I was waiting for the pasta water to boil one evening when he came abruptly, vividly to mind. Without pausing, I picked up the phone, asked the operator for his number and instead of giving it to me, she connected the call. A second later, a person I deeply valued and had often missed, came on the line as if we had just paused for breath. “Laura,” he said. “I’m so glad you called.  We just got back from Chicago. I’ve been part of a study there.  I have kidney cancer and it looks like I’ve got about 3 months to live.” 

It came to me then. Conversations from 20 years before.  Mike was an atheist. Mike had been born with only one kidney. 

My family was leaving for New Zealand in a few days where I’d be staying indefinitely—The Land of the Long White Cloud. Mike was soon leaving for parts unknown and was already well beyond visitors. 

We exchanged email addresses and I wrote to him as much as I thought his nurses would tolerate as the days counted down. He believed that at the moment of his death, he would cease to exist. Intuitively, I felt otherwise but kept to the facts.

I told him he was the best boss I’d ever had. And by boss I also meant friend. I thanked him for teaching me to play racquetball and by racquetball I meant how to polish a manuscript, how to make respect the point of origin for all relationships. I asked his forgiveness for redecorating his office over the weekend as a surprise, but getting paint on the carpet, a penalty he must have absorbed when the magazine closed. And by paint on the carpet, I meant, forgive me for every time I took your patient equanimity and generosity for granted.

From 12,000 miles away, I told him about being in New Zealand for the America’s Cup. I described the cheering crowds in the tidal basin, the excitement of watching mark roundings and tacking duels from the spectator fleet. 

Then an email arrived that he told me would be his last. A few days later, New Zealand won the America’s Cup, and I flew back to the States, reentered life here with 3 kids, organizing their activities, their return to school. I tried not to think about the inevitable news that was coming. A few weeks after that a woman who identified herself as Mike’s secretary called to say Mike had died.

I searched my inbox for his last email so that I could hear him tell me goodbye. Just above his name he had typed, “God bless you.” 

I don’t know if that was something Mike came to believe, said for my benefit, or just threw out there covering the bases for both of us. He had told me he wasn’t bitter or regretful about his impending death though he was young. He said, “I look at it this way: X number of people will die of cancer this year. If one of them is me, then one of them isn’t someone else.” Chance.  

But the fact that someone I loved and hadn’t spoken to in 23 years, came to mind at the exact and only moment in which I could have said thank you and goodbye, felt like something other than chance. With or without divine orchestration, it felt like more than an accident in timing. And his blessing felt intentional. 

Maybe we don’t have to believe that everything is chance, or nothing is. Maybe we don’t need to be that black and white. Maybe we aren’t going to know with such mathematical clarity what is a gift and what is a given. 

William James said, “No one knows the truth with a capital ‘T.’ The truth is what works.” 

Being open to possibility is the wild, tender nature of grace. And that works for me. 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.