To be honest, I haven’t the slightest idea what you mean. 
(I also would think the basic family dynamic is explained in a post like that. 
)
Working on the assumption that you really do not understand kambucta’s confusion:
You say “my sister…” – normally that would mean that you share both parents. Then you say “…had the unfortunate experience of burying both her parents” where “our” my be expected.
:smack:
Gotcha. Yeah, I tend to mix pronouns and tenses. It was both of our parents, of course.
You’re right, “million” would be out of the ballpark. It only requires two people (out of four) to match any of five, each with 500:1 odds.
This is a trivial incident but the coincidence involved was amazing.
A few years back I was on a long drive. To break up the trip, I stopped at several stores along the route. I was not a route I was familiar with so most of my stops were pretty much at random - if I was getting bored from driving and saw some place that looked interesting, I’d stop for a break.
One of my earlier stops had been at a store that sold used cd’s. And while walking around the store I saw a cd of David Cross doing a stand-up routine. It was cheap and I decided to buy it.
So I was driving along a couple of hours later and I put the David Cross cd in my player and was listening to it. And I was about half way through it when I saw a video store ahead.
I was getting bored and felt like a break from driving. So I decided on the spur of the moment to stop and see if they had any good videos for sale. I had never seen this store before and hadn’t planned on stopping there. It just happened to be around at a time when I felt like stopping.
And this is when the amazing coincidence kicked in. As I said, I was listening to the David Cross stand-up routine on cd. I pulled into the parking lot, turned off my car, and went into the store. And as I entered the store, I realized I was listening to the same David Cross routine I had just been listening to in my car. They were not only playing the same cd in the store, they were even playing the same part of it.
The odds are mind-boggling. This wasn’t some current popular song that was being played all over the place. This was an obscure comedy cd that was several years old. There were probably literally only two places in the world where it was being played at that moment and I happened to be in both of them a few seconds apart.
Only her sister needed to experience these events on her birthday. The fact that both parents were buried on the same calendar day is not overly improbable (365:1), but the date matching the birthday of one of their children raises the odds significantly, to the order of tens of thousands to one. The wording of the poster also allows for that fact that “her sister” might have been a half sister, step sister, or adopted sister, and only rules out twin sister.
At my college graduation, the parents of one of my roommates, who grew up 1000 miles away from me, realized when they met my parents that they had stayed at their house about 30 years prior. (They were friends of friends.)
My roommate and I had no idea that my parents had ever met before until that moment.
Naw, it’s my older sister, our parents, both buried on her birthday - our mother on her 8th birthday, my father on her 47th.
IMHO, both decisions were reprehensible. What… you can’t move the funeral back or forward one day? :rolleyes:
Friends we had in Saudi Arabia were from Minnesota, their son was roommates at Shadduck with our lawyer’s grandson from Madison, Wisconsin.
No me but…
My step brother and his wife gave up a little girl for adoption when they were in their teens. Fast forward 21 years …step brother’s SIL was a professor at Uof Michigan, one of her students came up and asked if she was her aunt!!! Yep true story…
I met a cousin who lived in Australia in London, when we were both vacationing there. She was taking her kids to the Greenwich Observatory on the DLR and I was taking mine. I had never met her, as she was born in Australia. It’s an even bigger coincidence that the conversation got around to an area where we figured out who we were. Neither of us had heard each other’s names in over 25 years.
Mentioned this here before (but am using my portable so hard to link). Yes, it was pretty improbable, and yes it was very meaningful. Up to that point in my life, I had been utterly directionless. One day, as the river in my backyard flowed on its merry way, the thought came to me suddenly, unbidden: it would be an utter shame if you had lived here for 20 years, and had never bothered to get acquainted with all of the wildlife, but esp. the birds.
So, 30 seconds after I walked out of my backyard, telescope in hand, I had a close encounter with a peregrine falcon, 20 feet away on top of a lamppost. I instantly became an utterly changed person. No idea where I would be now if I hadn’t seen it (or something equally good like a bald eagle).
It’s not generally of cosmic importance, but this happens to me a lot with people. I was once introduced to someone twice, by two different people on opposite ends of the country – she was internet-friends with one of my internet-friends, and the childhood best friend of my college sidekick.
I once met two people in completely separate places who had come to my alma mater from Las Vegas. Note that I didn’t go to school in Nevada, and neither of them were there for the major that my university specialized in. I knew them both for about a semester before I found out their parents used to throw drunken Christmas parties together.
i also recently found out that someone to whom I was referred for community theater work happens to be the long-term partner to another author who’s been attached to the publisher where I work for many, many years. I apparently just live in a very small world.