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“CLEARLY, MARY, WE ARE NOT LUCKY!”, wailed my sister Sue in her best Dirty Harry voice, whipping around to grab my shirt collar and give me stink eye.  After a second, and getting over the shock of the statement, we fell into a heap of laughter.  Nonetheless, as I think back, perhaps she may have had a point.  We were after all, trudging down an Iowa country road away from my stalled 1982 Plymouth Horizon and all I wanted to do was get to my mom’s farm for some TLC. It was end of June 1996 and four days earlier, my husband, of nineteen years, had died of a massive heart attack.  I was now a widow with two teenage children, a crappy car and a pile of medical bills. Bob’s death was only the start of that ill-fated weekend. There had been a teen suicide in our neighborhood, a friend’s son and husband killed in a trucking accident,  my sister, Sharon, struck a little girl with her car, (fortunately not injuring her) and my down-syndrome brother, Eddie, had  middle-of-the-night emergency surgery.  Moreover, my niece was to get married on that Saturday and two young men drowned in the river at the park where she was to be married.  This pushed my irreverent family over the edge.   No one will admit who conjured up visions of bodies popping up in the nearby stream during the ceremony and to be fair, it wasn’t their fault that they started laughing inappropriately during the ceremony.  We are Irish after all and our main coping skill for handling grief is humor. Which brings me back to the scene of three middle-aged, fluffy women walking single-file down the road, with a stray Irish Setter who had escaped his electric fence.  My sister, Sue had tethered...