If I told you I believed there were no coincidences in life and that everything happened for a reason bigger than the happening itself, for some of you I’d seem like a wide eyed right wing lunatic, for some it might ring a bell and you might nod knowingly. It is a matter of viewpoint and of hermeneutics, and I am glad to let you decide over this question and choose the side yourself.

But there are two things in my life right now – and when I say ’now’, I literally mean today - that I cannot possibly categorise as coincidences. For me they look an awful lot like providence and grace.

First - books. Over these past three years when I’ve seriously come back to literature, there have been numerous occasions when I’ve felt like the right books have come to me at the right time. It hasn’t happened only once or twice, it’s been more on the opposite side of the scale – when I pick up a new book, I almost expect to find something from it which would directly speak to my life and circumstances. It has happened so often. And this I call providence. It happened with Dallas Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy which was the first book I picked up after my mom died, numb with grief and loss. It happened with Frederick Buechner’s sermon collection I read last winter. It happened with Lauren Winner’s Mudhouse Sabbath which came to me through series of random coincidences (if you will) and which contained the right information I needed at that time for a lecture I was preparing. It happened a month ago when a friend told me to read Elisabeth Elliot’s Loneliness. And it also happened this past Thursday evening. I left Tallinn on Thursday, in desperate need for a break (why I needed a break is a matter of another post) and in the hope of a good long weekend away from my work and usual obligations. I landed at my cousin’s place in Tartu that evening and as I wandered through their apartment, I happened to pick up a book that was lying on a shelf. My cousin’s apartment is a place where they have always books lying around. When I’m there, I always sleep in their guest room which has tall book cases up to the ceiling, and I often take a long look at them. The book I randomly picked up this time was Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air (google it!), an autobiography by a brilliant and extremely successful young neurosurgeon who one day was diagnosed with terminal cancer himself. It’s a book about life and death and the meaning of both, from a man who saw them from both perspectives – from that of a doctor and from that of a dying patient. The afterword was written by his wife Lucy after his death... I picked it up on Thursday evening and I finished it on Friday afternoon, and descriptions from it hit home painfully – I too have seen someone die of cancer, I too have observed the decline of health and the painful death of hope. I too have had to stand face-to-face with questions about life and death and about their meaning or meaninglessness.

When I put down the book, it felt like I was ready to do something I hadn’t dared to do so far – to write about my mom’s last days and her death. I had dragged my laptop with me from Tallinn, not sure it was a reasonable thing to do, but after Kalanithi’s book that decision made a lot of sense to me. Here’s providence again.

And the second thing – my cousin’s summer house. After a pit stop at their place in Tartu, I got on a bus yeasterday morning and headed to their summer house in far South. It so happened that they themselves had to go to the opposite direction. My cousin’s father-in-law, a well-known Estonian movie director, was celebrating his birthday on Friday, and they headed to Tallinn for the birthday celebrations. But they were kind enough to give me the keys of their summer house for the weekend. We tried to find any other cousin who could bring me here and stay for the weekend, but everyone had already plans made so I came alone. And thus I have the whole place for myself now. I’ve heated the sauna, I’ve cracked open the ice hole in the lake with an iron bar, I have read and drank tea and eaten chocolate, but most importantly, I have been able to open my laptop and a new text document and write about my mom. I would not have been able to do it if my cousin’s family or any other relative was here. Then I would have ran around with the kids and played board games or would have had to engage in discussions. But alone in this vast quietness in the middle of woods, I have been able to bring back the memories, and I have been able to write – write about the things I remember (for some things have started to blur in my memory), and the things I can bring myself to write about (there are some details about her last days and our last conversations I could never write about). I’ve done a fair amount of crying too, obviously. But that’s fine because there’s no-one here to see it.

The whole thing has been liberating and painful. And needed.

And this is what I can’t see as a coincidence – Kalanithi’s book, my laptop, and the little sauna house, all in one place over a long weekend. Providence. Grace.