Five Ways My Wife Could Die

by Gregory Blake Smith

When the tree fell on my house, I was already on my way down. Wife gone, son gone, middle age just around the corner. There had been no hurricane, no stiff in-line winds: the tree just fell over—plunk! The rafters snapped, the window imploded, and there I was lying in bed going eenie-meenie-minie-moe as to whether it would be Seconal and scotch or a razor in the bathtub.

In probability theory we have an axiom called Littlewood's Law of Miracles. The Law of Miracles is based upon a paradoxical feature of chance, viz. that given sufficiently large numbers, unlikely events will happen unexpectedly often. (Hand me that piece of chalk.) If we define a miracle (M) as something that happens once in a million events, and take as a given that we see and hear such events (e) at a rate of about one per second (boy on his bike, sun coming out, Toyota approaching), then since we experience roughly a million such events in a month of waking life, by the laws of probability we should experience a miracle about once a month. The uncanny isn't uncanny after all. Jesus just happened to hit with Lazarus. The scotch is supposed to exacerbate the effect of the Seconal.

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