Chapter 122

Over the years, when people asked my profession and I said “actuary,” they did one of three things.

Their eyes lit up with interest because they misheard me and believed I said “actor” and they wanted to know what they might have seen me in.

They frowned, perplexed, and said, “What’s an actuary?”

Or, if they had a glimmer of understanding of the role of an actuary, they would make this jokey request: “So tell me, Cherry, when am I going to die?”

“Funny,” I would say (although it wasn’t), but you know what? I always answered the question in my head. I never said it out loud, butI would do a quick analysis of the data available. The person’s age,gender, weight, whether they smoked, their wealth and social status, their hobbies (if I knew they engaged in extreme sports, for example), lifestyle, diet, and so on and so forth, and I would come up with a cause and age of death. For my own amusement.

Were my actions on that flight a strange version of that peculiar secret exercise? Was there any method to my madness?

To be very, very clear, this is not what an actuary does and I remain deeply embarrassed for bringing my beloved profession into disrepute that day. We do not point our fingers at individuals and tell them how and when they will die, rather we make educated predictions regarding the probability that any individual, belonging to a particular cohort, will die before their next birthday.

Were my predictions related to the fact that the focus of my work before I retired was mortality forecasting by cause of death? Was all that data swirling madly in my head like debris in the terrifying weather phenomenon known as a “twister”? (I am thinking now of the excellent movie Twister starring the talented actress Helen Hunt.)

Did I develop my own set of random assumptions by utilizing the very little information available to me?

For example, Leo Vodnik had held a magazine titled Construction Engineering Australia. Men are ten times more likely than women to die at work. Is that all it took for me to predict a “workplace accident” as his cause of death?

Ethan Chang had his arm in a cast. Was it his injury that made me choose “assault,” together with the fact that injury and violence is a leading cause of death for young adult men?

I know I watched Kayla Halfpenny at the airport and saw her knock over her drink and then her phone. Was it my observation of the sweet girl’s clumsiness together with the fact that road traffic injuries are one of the leading causes of death among young adults that led me to say “car accident”?

Did I simply make random choices? Is that what led me to pancreatic cancer, the most feared cancer, for the vibrant woman who reminded me of my friend Jill, and breast cancer for the pregnant woman?

Did I temporarily believe I was Madame Mae? I must have been thinking of my mother, because I kept saying “fate won’t be fought.”

Had I somehow become a strange alchemy of the two of us?

Both of us, after all, specialized in predictions.

There are certain events in my life that I believe may have had a profound effect on me. For example: the little boy who drowned at the blowhole when I was a child. I have never forgotten the sound of his mother screaming. That boy had brown eyes and dark hair. When I saw that dear little brown-eyed, dark-haired baby, did I think of that poor boy and therefore predict the baby would drown at the same age?

Did I look at the young bride, Eve, and remember the charming woman who came to my mother for readings, who was so excited about her forthcoming wedding, the first wedding I ever attended? Did I think of the time I saw her at the shops, her inner light snuffed out, and remember how she died in a fire believed to have been lit by her husband?

Why did I choose self-harm for Allegra, the beautiful flight attendant? Was it simply that I saw repressed pain in her eyes from the back injury I now know she suffered on that flight? Was it because I knew the rate of suicide in young females has been steadily increasing over recent years?

Was I thinking of death as I boarded the plane and contemplating the fact that everyone on that plane would one day die, and wondering what their causes of death would ultimately be?

Well. That’s the only one of my questions I can answer with certainty. Of course I was thinking of death. I had my husband’s ashes in my carry-on bag. I was missing my two best friends. I was thinking of every person I had ever lost throughout my life.

I was crazed with grief.

At times I am still crazed with grief.

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All I can do is sincerely apologize and make this clear: I am not a psychic. I am a bereaved retired actuary who suffered a mental health crisis on a flight.