“Everything happens for a reason” 

Everyone has had this said to them once or twice in their life, which you may reply with an eye roll because it is the most generic, cliche advice anyone can give. But it really is an easy response when life decides to stray from the path one has spent so long paving. Sometimes in life people come and go, there are failures and then successes, bad things happen only for good to occur after. That’s just life, and it is 100% out of our control. 

Boni Rae is your stereotypical southern belle. She is the administrative coordinator at the Wake Forest Football center.  She greets everyone at the door with her warm southern charm and kind hearted smile that you just can’t help but smile back. The football boys are like her children, and for the past 18 years she has watched each and every player who has walked through the door to the Pruitt center grow and mature. As an outsider anyone would say Boni was born for this job, but it was really her husband who brought her to Wake Forest. 

Boni had been a flight attendant for 25 years before coming to work at Wake. One day she was attending a flight in New York. For anyone who has worked the same job for 25 years she went in with the mindset that it would be another routine day of work, but life tends to get exciting when you least expect it.   

The flight took off. All seemed well.  Up until a young pregnant Woman started experiencing difficulties. She was having a miscarriage. They immediately had to make an emergency landing in New York. Boni, being the flight attendant, was the first to attend to the woman and remained with her while the medics and police arrived. It was during that moment that while one's life was being taken from them, another piece of life appeared. 

Boni could easily recall meeting her husband during that fateful moment. He was the cop who arrived on the scene of the woman having a miscarriage, and it was love at first sight, she saw fireworks, sparks, and whatever else one feels when they fall in love. Regardless of what one would call it, there was a clear connection there. It was almost as if this beautiful love between the woman and her child was transferred to Boni and her future husband. Amazing how life works. It can be so cruel and so magical all at once. 

Boni and her husband are still married today and now have 3 children, 3 grandchildren, and the extended football family. While what happened to the pregnant woman on that flight was truly something you wish upon no one it led to the creation of another life; a marriage which continues to live and has created many other lives which also live on. So while one shudders at one event, I cannot help but smile at what it led to. Everything really does happen for a reason.