Only Human with Joan Axelrod-Contrada: Learning to thank my lucky stars

I used to scoff at the notion of luck.

When my boyfriend, Rick, told me he was lucky to have three great kids, I took his assessment as a case of misplaced modesty.

“It’s not luck,” I said, all logical and rational. “You and your wife raised them well.”

He agreed, graciously giving his late wife, Nancy, most of the credit, and we moved on. Still, the matter of luck weighed on me.

As much as I knew that bad things happened to good people, I hated that my late husband, Fred, died of a cruel neurological disease with no known cause. Just bad luck. I wanted to blame something. His bicycling accident. His years of insomnia. The pesticides he breathed in while working on an orchard in Oregon. To make myself feel better, I gave money toward finding a cure.

Was life just a roll of the dice, a crapshoot, a random game of chance? I didn’t want to think so. For me, luck got only a bit part in the drama of life.

I preferred the laws of cause and effect, the Buddhist concept of karma, the idea that what goes around comes around. Fred, for instance, lived a life of treating people well, so when he got sick, they showed up for him.

Neither he nor I had burst out of the womb blessed with extraordinary beauty or brilliance. Instead, we worked hard for what we got. Wouldn’t attributing our success to luck diminish everything we had accomplished?

Just as I was mulling over that question, a TV show came along that knocked my socks off. “Maid,” inspired by Stephanie Land’s book about her experiences as a single mother who cleaned houses to survive, shows the role bad luck plays in keeping us from living our dreams. In the fictionalized series from Netflix, the protagonist, Alex, grows up poor and lacking in parental support. She’s white, but the cards are still stacked against her.

Ultimately, her talent as a writer saves her. Still, her journey is a million times harder than that of someone like myself who was born into an upper middle-class, relatively stable family. Privilege is the ultimate sign of good luck.

“Maid” got me out of my head and, like all great art, helped me see life anew. I was one lucky girl!

After watching the series, I started taking myself less seriously. All my hard work was well and good, but it didn’t add up to as much as I thought it did.

Advice-givers always tell us to make our own luck. Cast a wide net. Increase our odds. Be in the right place at the right time.

Take dating, for instance. I followed the advice to a tee. Match.com had the broadest reach, so that’s the site I chose. My first go-round as a widow led me to a guy who seemed too good to be true. It turns out he was. I didn’t realize until a year into the relationship that my twice-divorced guy, who said he didn’t drink at all, was hiding a bad drinking problem from me.

So, when I went back on Match, I decided to look for a widower who, like me, drank socially. Enter Rick, who got bonus points for having a dog. Not just any pooch, mind you. His little white fluffball Darwin stole my heart.

Rick and I joked that Darwin was my true love. His human was just the tagalong guy. All kidding aside, I lauded myself for being savvy enough to look for a guy with a dog.

Dog lovers were my kind of people. Warm and affectionate. The kind who wore boots instead of dress shoes. Loyal through and through. I ended up with Rick because I put time and effort into finding him. Luck had very little to do with it, right?

Well, that’s what I wanted to believe. But, after watching “Maid,” something in me changed. I became more willing to factor chance into the equation.

What if I had waited a week, and someone else had snatched up my guy? What if I lived in a different time and place? What if I were expected to throw myself on my husband’s funeral pyre?

So, the other day, when Rick said, “I’m the luckiest guy,” I didn’t try to change his mind. Nor did I chalk up his observation to his refreshingly sweet modesty.

Instead, I murmured, “I’m the luckiest girl.” And I meant it.

Joan Axelrod-Contrada is a writer who lives in Florence. She writes a monthly column for the Gazette, Only Human, that runs on the second Friday of the month. You can reach her at joanaxelrodcontrada@gmail.com.