1. You’re Gonna Die

If I got a hundred dollars for every time I heard somebody say, “Here’s what happensif I die….,” I could’ve retired, a long time ago.

It’swhen you die, and no, it doesn’t matter if you’re a big shot or just a medium shot—you’re still gonna die.

I’m a probate lawyer. I do wills, plan for death and disability and clean up what’s left when people die. If my job has taught me anything over the past forty years, it’s that life’s a sucker bet: Something’s trying to kill you, every stinking minute of every single day.

Don’t get me started on roofers, tuck-pointers, circus performers or guys who feed tree branches into those buzzing mulching machines. The thing is, though, they all have reason to expect to get dropped, crunched or pulverized by the jaws of fate. But then, there’s this:

I was once involved in reporting a case where a woman standing on a street corner was struck and killed by a falling stone gargoyle. The building ornament had been loosened from the crumbling skyscraper’s outer wall through a series of seemingly random events. A dental hygienist in an office with a window ledge above the gargoyle, started a small window-box garden. Dripping water from her garden seeped into the foundation holding the sculpted critter, although that alone would not have been enough to dislodge the gargoyle. Turns out, fertilizer and bird droppings from sparrows and pigeons feeding on the seeds in her garden laced the dripping water, so that corrosive mixture set loose the crashing sculpture.

If random, unavoidable death weren’t bad enough, there’s the people who get fair warning: I know this accountant who was in a plane that crash landed on a runway, surrounded by fire trucks. He survived the crash, as did the rest of the passengers, but before he jumped on the escape chute he went back up the aisle for his carry-on, flight attendants screaming at him all the way. He barely made it off in time. When I asked what was in his bag, he admitted it was just dirty laundry, a pair of gym shoes and a half-eaten sack lunch.

Then there’s the phenomena of people with money and power, who take crazy risks because they think that with their stature comes a suspension of the basic laws of physics. Private airplane pilots are some of the worst: I recall one such crash victim who had multiple funerals over the years, as picnickers located his assor