Throwaway: when my daughter was 4, she took a bath. My wife was in the living room doing laundry, literally 5 steps away. At that point, my daughter had just fi

Throwaway: when my daughter was 4, she took a bath. My wife was in the living room doing laundry, literally 5 steps away. At that point, my daughter had just finished swimming class 3 months before. I was at work. When she called "mum!", my wife said: "Coming" and folded one final shirt. When she then entered the bathroom, my daughter floated in the tub, face down. No breathing, no sign of life anymore. My wife revived here on the floor of our living room while calling 911 and crying for help. She had a simple fever cramp (her second) in the tub and nearly drowned because of it. This was roughly a year ago. I remember walking out of the building at work in trance, looking for a cab, after I got the call, thinking my daughter was dead. She was back to normal (apart from the nasty infection that lead to the fever cramp) on the next day. Buy my wife and I have never been the same since. I entered the apartment 2 days later, and the tub was still filled with water and some of my daughters hair, and there was blood on the living room floor because the medics gave her sedatives and she kicked against the syringe. While cleaning my daughter's blood from the floor, I got the distinct feeling that she really died and that I was just in a very long dream in which she survived, and that I would wake up very soon to a world of sorrow. That feeling has never left me. It may explain why most things now feel completely irrelevant to me, including work. We quickly bought a house 6 months later and left the apartment. I now realize that this was mostly motivated by the fact that we couldn't stand the look of the bathtub anymore. It was also because we simply weren't afraid anymore of the debt, of the additional work, of moving. Fear is something that only remains a numb feeling after such an experience. She is 5 now. The worst part is that she fully remembers. A few weeks ago, she freely and cheerfully explained in daycare that she once was bathing and then cried "mum" and then "fell asleep under water". At dinner a few months ago, she also explained that to us and then laughed and mentioned that "mum must've thought I am a mermaid" and happily continued eating. It crushes me just thinking of it. If my wife had folded 2 or 3 shirts before entering the bathroom, my daughter would be dead now. If my daughter hadn't yelled "mum!" the second the fever cramp started, of if she would've yelled it under water, she would also be dead now. In this probabilistic decision tree, the leaf where my daughter survives has a probability that is negligibly small. To my very great surprise, I have found that this inevitably leads to religion. I have never been religious before, but I have indeed found great relief in prayer and sitting around in empty churches. Life to us is now nothing but walking on a thin crust of ice, which spans over an infinite hell of fire, horror and torture. At any time, without warning, the ice may break.