I think we consider too much the good luck of the early bird and not enough the bad luck of the worm. Franklin Delano Roosevelt

There was a time when I didn’t know how many children got cancer every year. 15,000, Each one someone’s precious child. 15% to 90% of them could die, depending on the type and stage of the disease, I learned.

Back in the before times, I still believed in living well as a wedge against misfortune. That we could accumulate stores of luck by being kind and making good choices. That low-odds outcomes happened to other people. Most of all, I was convinced I could keep my children safe by remaining alert, being overprotective, doling out warnings, precluding the worst-case scenario.

Jimmy’s diagnosis in 2006 and death in 2014 shattered every one of those ill-informed ideas. There were almost 74 million children under the age of 18 in this country in 2006. Approximately 300 of them got diagnosed with medulloblastoma, the brain tumor that stole Jimmy’s life. As then nine-year-old Molly pointed out, we had a better chance of winning the Oregon Lucky Lines lottery.

Yet the odds weren’t any higher that one of the children’s hospitals in Portland had one of the best pediatric neurosurgeons in the country or that the other had Dr. Guillaume, one of the only pediatric neurosurgeons trained in minimally invasive endoscopic biopsies of the brain. When Dan and I asked the pediatric neuro-oncologist at St. Jude’s whether we should bring Jimmy there for treatment, he told us to stay put. Dr. Nicholson, who remained in charge of Jimmy’s care even after we moved back to California when Jimmy started college, had been part of the team that created the state-of-the-art treatment for Jimmy’s kind of brain cancer. The year after Jimmy died, both Dr. Guillaume and Dr. Nicholson left for new roles in other states.

Jimmy’s high school counselor came to the junior high six months before the end of his eighth-grade year to meet him and us. She wanted to understand his treatment plan, help ensure he got teachers that would work with him and be sure he had everything he needed in place before he started as a freshman. For four years, she fought for Jimmy. She took on the teacher who docked his participation points when he was in the hospital getting chemotherapy and couldn’t come to class. She arranged for him to do independent study when the biology teacher left unexpectedly two months into the school year, and the substitute was unsympathetic to his need for extra help. She believed in him when he told her wanted to go Stanford, despite everything that had happened. She was one of the first people he called when the acceptance letter came. The summer after high school graduation, when we relocated to California to be near Jimmy, she moved to Colorado.

So often we only call it luck when we get the outcome we yearn for or the one we most feared. What about all the other times when something amazing happens that doesn’t rise to the level of our attention? A kindness when we most needed one. A client who discloses that she, too, knows the devastation of losing a child. A lifelong friendship with the hospice nurse, social worker or pediatric nurse practitioner. The people who don’t stop saying our children’s names and remember them still decades later.

Jimmy taught me to be grateful for these unexpected gifts, to appreciate the luck of the ordinary. We take so much for granted in this life. Our children’s health, their marriages, grandchildren. None of it is a given. Nothing is guaranteed.

Dr. Nicholson used to say that the smallest mathematical chance of a bad outcome is no comfort when you are the one it’s happening to. 15% of kids with Jimmy’s type of medulloblastoma live. It never occurred to me he wouldn’t be one of them until he wasn’t.

But the thing about luck is that there’s always a choice involved. We might get the life partner, the shiny job, the payday, the good genes. But we give up something in the process. Often unseen, we might never know the life would have led had the outcome been different.

I’ve spent countless hours wishing the odds had been in our favor. Railing against the unfairness, only to remind myself how lucky I was to have had Jimmy at all. To have my son for 21 years meant I had to lose him. But even if the choice had been within my control, I would not have made a different one. Like Stephen Colbert, I have learned to love the thing I most wish had not happened. To see it for the beautiful, brutal blessing it is.