A good week for Irony or maybe not…

It’s been an interesting week for Irony. First there was the struggling young cowboy down on his luck who without much thought bought a lottery ticket. That lottery ticket yielded a whopping $232,000,000. What a happy irony.

Next there was the loving daughter in Tel Aviv who, to surprise her mother, threw out her mother's old mattress and replaced it with a brand new one. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to the daughter, her mother had a major mistrust of banks and had stuffed into that old mattress a million little ironies in the form of dollars and schekels. As of this writing, they are still frantically searching the city dump for that old mattress and, though clearly not a happy irony, that could change. Such are the great ironies of life.

But then there is another kind of irony – the tragic kind and the kind many people fear. Johanna Ganthaler and her husband Kurt had been vacationing in Brazil. As happens sometimes, they arrived late to the airport in Rio de Janeiro and missed their flight back to Paris. Four hours later that flight they missed went down in the Atlantic with no survivors. Whether they knew their original flight had gone down is uncertain, but they were able to catch another flight and arrived in Paris later than planned, but safe and sound. Unfortunately for Johanna and Kurt, something else was waiting for them when they arrived back in Paris. While driving back to their home in Italy, their car swerved to miss something in the road and was struck by oncoming traffic. Johanna, who missed certain death in a fatal plane crash only days earlier, was killed instantly. Her husband remains in critical condition. Either way, this is a tragic irony.

Are these ironies fated? Are they random? Is it true that when it is your time to go, the Grim Reaper will find you? Maybe it was Johanna’s time to go, but not Kurt’s. Who knows? This much I do know, life is full of ironies, so buy that lottery ticket, check that mattress BEFORE you throw it out, and, most of all, make sure you let your family and friends know you love them because you never know when Irony will put you on that path to the Great Hereafter.