There is so much NOT to give thanks for.

Last year, my health plummeted – thanks to the ramifications of a long-ago accident – and so did my finances, thanks to the diligent work of a fake “investment broker” who lifted everything we’d saved.

Those are big things.

Sometimes I think that we give thanks because we’re afraid not to give thanks, lest what remains may be taken away.

However, I often think of the late-summer night when my longtime assistant, Pamela, called to tell me that we did have numbered bank accounts at reputable banks, just as the Ponzi schemers had told us, but that there was no money in them.

At that moment, while watching my two youngest boys, 4 and 6, jump through rainbows in the yard sprinkler, I felt for one of only three times in my life that I might fall down, that my legs might give out as legs do when the brain tells them that a person this shocked has no business standing.

It took a full 24 hours to think of what else she might have said, just as easily.

She might have said, “Jack, Danny wasn’t even speeding when he pulled into the intersection …”

She might have said, “Your brother never regained consciousness, which means at least he didn’t suffer.”

She might have said, “The doctor called about Will’s blood test. It’s probably nothing to be concerned about but …”

Then, instead of being difficult and vexing and frustrating and sometimes thankless, my life would have been rocks and dirt, mud and ash. Time would have winked out, the demarcation between morning sun and night gloaming meaningless. If I lived, and I would have done my best not to live, it would be only for my body to drift through the spaces my self once occupied. I would haunt my own house.

For a while, it seemed I’d lost everything I lived to enjoy.

But I lost nothing I couldn’t live without.

And so I am grateful to an indifferent universe. I’m still lucky. As the Irish say, “Worse luck makes you appreciate the bad.”

It’s true.