Our tax guy was flipping through our W-2 statements and receipts when the conversation took an unexpected turn.

Harold is a no-nonsense straight shooter who is not above mocking our meager deductions. But on this morning he was in a pensive mood. Maybe I had caught him early in the tax season.

There were some major wrinkles in our financial situation over the past year, what with my husband retiring, and I was apprehensive about how we would fare. Leaning forward on the edge of my chair as Harold’s fingers tap-danced across the keys of an old-school calculator, I must have looked like a kid who had been summoned to the principal’s office.

As the calculator spit out one tabulation after another, Harold began to tell me how he had just heard from his sister on the mainland, who had been working at her desk when she suddenly lost some of her speech functions. The doctors told her it was a TIA: transient ischemic attack, a sort of a temporary mini-stroke that can be a precursor to a bigger “event.”

She was given “magic medicine,” in Harold’s words, that dissolved the blood clot in her brain, and the very next day she was back at her desk. But instead of taking a moment to embrace life and marvel at the wonder of modern medicine and her quick turnaround, Harold’s sister went straight to the internet to investigate. There she found statistics showing that up to 17 out of 100 people who suffer a TIA will experience a stroke within 90 days.

She told Harold she was certain she would be one of the 17.

Now back to me: Cynicism is an occupational hazard for journalists. Over the course of a long news career I’ve seen too many bad things happen to good people and long ago learned that nothing and nobody is as good as they seem. So I get Harold’s sister.

Peering at me from over his bifocals, the sage tax man shook his shaggy salt-and-pepper head and offered an explanation for his sister’s glass-half-empty outlook: “I think in Western culture we tend to celebrate the good things that happen to us but hang on to the bad things for a very long time.”

I couldn’t disagree.

By the end of my appointment, I learned we were due a healthy tax refund that we could use to pay down some bills. It was easy to celebrate that.

Two days later I was at my desk reading the newspaper. I paused on the obituary page to look for classmates and other acquaintances, because that’s what you do once you’ve breached the half-century mark. My eyes automatically picked out the people who were around my age.

Oh, lordy, I thought.

Then I remembered my visit with Harold. I turned back to the obituaries, this time scanning the gray columns for the names in between those death notices that had first drawn my interest. There they were, those folks who passed on at 86, 89, 91, 95 and so on.

My shoulders relaxed and I took a deep breath.

There may be no avoiding death (or taxes), but thanks to Harold, I am choosing to look ahead to many happy returns.

“She Speaks” is a weekly column by the women writers of the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. Reach Christie Wilson at cwilson@staradvertiser.com.