Well by Sandro Galea

Author:Sandro Galea
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

thirteen

Luck

“I was so close to dying I could feel the Grim Reaper’s breath on my face.”

This is the line she uses, the young veteran, when she talks about her experience of the war. It has become a stock phrase for her. She is sick of saying it, but then she is also sick of telling the story of why it is absolutely true, why she should be dead but for some reason is not. Of course, the line is accurate, in a way. She had felt a kind of breath on her face, when the bullet jostled the air next to her cheek.

“It was a sniper from somewhere. I don’t know. I never saw him. I was lucky.”

She always ends the story this way, with an acknowledgment of luck. People expect it. How else to explain what happened? Luck beyond luck. She knows it. It eats at her. She feels cursed now, like she used up all her good fortune in that moment on the battlefield. Ever since, she has waited for the hammer to fall, for some calamity to visit her, now that her luck is spent. While she waits, she drinks. She has a different bar for each day of the week. Today is Thursday’s. The man she drinks with is an old-timer, wise-looking, who wanted to know why a young woman would swallow so much whisky so early in the day. Somehow, the veteran finds herself telling the story again. When she finishes, the old man blinks at her.

“Lucky? That was not luck. True good fortune is having five fingers on each hand, no diseases, a regular income, and managing to get through life without ever once being smashed to pieces by a hurricane. We live in a world where catastrophe hangs in the very air. To be alive and intact is to have avoided, for thousands and thousands of days, the worst of what existence can bring. You think you exhausted your luck in a split second? You are seeing it wrong. That bullet was an aberration, a flicker of bad luck in what has so far been a charmed life. Trust me. I am old enough to know.”

From the day we are born until the day we die, our circumstances are deeply influenced by chance. We have no say, for example, over whether we are born into poverty or wealth, or into a country that is at peace or at war, or into a family that is loving or neglectful. And if all of these variables unfold in our favor, we must admit that we are the beneficiaries of tremendous, unearned luck.

In our more reflective moments, we may acknowledge the luck of such a life. However, we rarely think about the link between luck and health. But we should think about it, perhaps all the time. The influence of luck is perhaps never more profound than when it affects health. As the old man in the story says, momentary good luck pales in comparison to

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