Where Free Will Begins

People take umbrage when I tell them that I believe we are born on a certain day and we die on a certain day, and in between those two events is where our free will exists. When I started thinking about it, I've changed it a little. Now I believe we are conceived on a certain day and die on a certain day, and so it is written. I changed the word born to conceived because there are babies who are miscarried, or die in utero, or are aborted.
I came to believe this concept in my early 20's when I met a a guy who had fought in Viet Nam and he said, "it just wasn't my time to die." He said they'd be in a skirmish with bullets flying everywhere, and when the fight was over, and he was alive, he'd stand up and there'd be bullet marks on his canteen, or his belt, or his helmet, but not in him.
That must have started me down that road. And then so many other examples just solidify my argument. For example, when my husband was in high school, he was hit in the head with a shot put. He was knocked down, he was cut and bled profusely, but he did not die. If it had been his day to go, that would have done him in. A 16 pound metal ball cracked his head open and he lived to tell about it.
Or this: One sunny fall morning my son and I walked to the bus stop for his 3rd week of kindergarten. We would usually meet up with another mom and her 2 kids. That particular morning, the dad came down the hill with the kids. We stood in a different place than we usually do, and were chatting and waiting for the bus, when suddenly a car skidded into the curb, turned on its side and came roaring at us at an unbelievable speed. Think the boulder in Raider's of the Lost Arc.
I grabbed my son around the arm and pulled him and ran as fast as I could away from the colliding car. I looked back, thinking the dad and his kids were doomed. He threw them into the bushes, away from the car, and when it stopped, we were all alive and shaking in the electrified air. The dad had enough presence to go to the car, which was laying completely on its side over the entire width of the sidewalk, and opened the passenger door to see if the driver was OK. He was fine, just smoking his cigarette and looking hardly worse for the wear. The idiot. It turns out later, he had had his license revoked a few months earlier, and wasn't even supposed to be driving. If we had been standing where the mom and the kids and I used to stand, it would have been all over for us. Plus, she was 7 or 8 months pregnant, and never would have been able to get those kids out of the way. When I later asked her why she didn't come down with the kids, she didn't know. She just thought the dad should have gone. Hmmmm.
There are other examples of not living through something that shouldn't have caused death. Like, a day at Disneyland. Like Steve Irwin and his friendly little stingray incident. Like the lady who was standing on her yacht, enjoying the blue Mediterranean when a stingray flew up, hit her so hard, she feel back and died and so did the stingray.
I know people say, how about airplane crashes, or 9/11? Well, I don't know all the answers.
But, strangely, my belief comforts me.