Lucky 

Austin seemed to spend his entire life walking away from things that should have ended much differently. Not the kind of luck that wins the lottery or finds a twenty-dollar bill lying in a parking lot. His was the kind of luck that made doctors shake their heads, made friends stand in disbelief, and left all of us saying, "It could have been so much worse."

Sometimes I wonder if Austin was the luckiest unlucky person I've ever known.

Other times I wonder if something had been protecting him his whole life... while something else never stopped trying to hurt him.

It's one of the questions I struggle with now.

Why survive so much only to lose him the way we did?

When Austin was five years old, we adopted a chocolate Labrador from a rescue.

 One afternoon, I turned around just in time to see that dog take Austin's entire face into its mouth.

 I tackled the dog, grabbed Austin, and all I could see was blood. There was so much of it I couldn't even tell where he was hurt.

 At the hospital, the damage was almost unbelievable.

 Five stitches in his scalp. A cauterized wound inside his sinus cavity. One canine tooth had punctured the top of his head. Another missed his eye by only centimeters. The other scraped its way up his nose.

 The doctor looked at me and said he was incredibly lucky.

 If that dog had bitten down harder or shaken its head the way dogs often do, our lives would have changed forever.

 Instead, Austin slept in his own bed that night.

A few years later, Austin decided to sneak into his dad's shop because he wanted to strip the paint off one of his Hot Wheels cars.

 He was always taking something apart just to see if he could make it better.

 A few minutes later, he walked through the door with his hand wrapped in his shirt, which was soaked in blood.

" I think I need to go to the hospital," he calmly said.  My finger went into the bench grinder."

I thought the tip of his finger was gone.

 After a few stitches, the doctor smiled and said,

 "Boy... you're lucky. It only took the skin."

That wouldn't be the last time we heard those words

When Austin was seventeen, he was removing the transmission from a Jeep.

The jack slipped.

The Jeep came down.

Austin was trapped underneath with the transmission pinning him in place.

His dad managed to lift the Jeep just enough while his friend Gavin pulled Austin out by his legs.

We headed to the emergency room expecting broken bones or internal injuries.

Instead...

Bruises.

Just bruises.

the doctor walked in shaking his head.

"You have any idea how lucky you are? Accidents like this usually end very differently."

One rainy evening in Uwharrie, Austin's Jeep broke on Dutch John Trail.

On the steepest part of the trail, a place everyone simply calls The Chute, his fuel pump couldn't keep up with the incline.

 We tried everything we could to pull him to the top.

 Nothing worked.

 As darkness settled in, we decided to change positions.

 The moment we unhooked the recovery strap, the park pin failed.

 Austin's Jeep started rolling backwards.

Fast.

Completely out of control.

 He yelled for the girls riding with him to get down into the floorboards.

 The Jeep barreled backward until one Tree—caught the rear passenger corner.

 That little tree stopped an entire Jeep before it tumbled down a rocky mountainside.

 The impact bent the frame and buckled the back seat.

 Nobody had a scratch.

 The next day it took three Jeeps and nearly an entire day to recover it.

 When we finally pulled it onto level ground...

Austin climbed in and drove it out of the woods.

Another night, Austin and Wyatt called to say they'd gone fishing.

Thirty minutes later the phone rang.

"We've had a wreck."

They hadn't just run off the road.

They blew through a stop sign and hit a tree head-on at around forty-five miles an hour.

Only...     The tree uprooted.

Instead of stopping them instantly, it fell with them.

Just a few feet to one side was a power pole.

A few feet to the other was a steep rocky drop-off.

They somehow hit the only half-rotted tree with soggy roots.

The Tahoe was totaled.

Even the fishing worms survived without a scratch. 

There were more.

A grinding wheel exploded and drove pieces through his hand, somehow missing bones, nerves, and an artery.

A radiator cap exploded, covering him from head to toe with boiling antifreeze. Somehow only one leg was burned.

A piece of metal flew into his eye while he was operating a forklift. It had to be surgically removed after stopping only millimeters from permanently damaging his vision.

Then there was the BMW.

While we were out of town, Austin borrowed his dad's car. It had a small oil leak.

He'd been driving it hard, the exhaust manifold got hot, and when he pulled into our driveway the car was already on fire.

Our security camera shows him getting out, completely unaware of the flames underneath.

Six minutes later...

There was nothing left.

He burned his hands trying to save the car and his belongings.

Six minutes.

Stitches.

Staples.

Burns.

Hospital visits.

Hospital visits.

Broken vehicles.

Stories that usually ended with someone saying,

"Boy... you're lucky."

Everyone called Austin lucky.

I never did.

I called him special.

Maybe that's because I was his mom.