Fortuna was not a girl you wanted to marry. Even dating her could be dangerous. Fortuna, as you might recall, was the goddess of fortune in Roman mythology. Fortuna had a pretty face that made a person want to court her. The problem was that her pretty face could turn ugly in a split second. The beautiful girl you took to the dance might show a hideous face before the last dance was done. For that same reason, the ancient Romans used to portray Fortuna as having two faces. They understood she could be just as ugly as she could be pretty. So it is with fortune. There is good fortune and there is bad fortune. Both seem to come out of nowhere. Both seem undeserved. Both are life changers.
Twenty-five years have come and gone, but I still remember him. He was 35 years old and he was dying. It is tragic anytime someone so young is dying–even if Saint Augustine said it isn’t the quantity of years that defines a life, but the quality of those years. Augustine may have been right in theory, but tell that to a young man dying of AIDS. His friends asked me to visit with him because they thought he needed somebody who could talk to him about dying. I’ve always believed the most credible person to talk about dying is someone who has died. But, of course, a person who has died doesn’t talk about it. So I went.
I remember next to nothing about his appearance. The years have whitewashed any memory of externals. I’m assuming he was emaciated, since that is symptomatic of the disease, but that is speculative on my part because I don’t recall, although I visited him on several occasions. There are other things I do remember. For one, I remember he was living his last days with friends in their home. These two friends had become his caregivers. I remember they were some of the most caring and giving people I have met. They were the ones who had called me to come to their home to talk to their friend about dying.
I remember this young man had an aura–an overused word, granted–but his inner spirit shone. He drew people to him. It often is said that as one dies one becomes more of the same person that one was in life. I have found that statement to be true in most instances. A hard-to-like person becomes harder-to-like in the dying process. The opposite also is true. A kind person becomes kinder as he or she moves into the final phase of life. So it was with this young man. He had a lightness–by which I mean he was light-hearted, delightful, emitting a light that was warm and welcoming. He would die in December, the darkest month of the year, which seemed right because when he was gone there was less light in the world.
I remember one more thing about those visits. And it is the thing that has stayed with me over the years. As he lay in his bed and his body was disappearing in daily withdrawals, like money in a checking account, the one thing that brought him some joy was the TV show “Wheel of Fortune.” So devoted was he to the show that I planned my visits around it, not wanting to be in the way of something that brought him a moment’s happiness. I think his friends had asked if I could work around it. I did for the most part. On one occasion I believe I came at the same time as the TV show. Still, he was gracious and gave me his attention.
Something about the juxtaposition of a young man dying at age 35 while watching “Wheel of Fortune” each day left an impression on me that won’t go away whatever the number of years that have passed. Maybe it was the irony. Then again, maybe it wasn’t ironic at all. I never got around to asking him why he enjoyed the show so much. I suspect he would have answered along the line of it being a good distraction or it was entertaining or it helped pass the time. Yet, I often wondered if he gave a thought to his own bad fortune or if he pondered the wily nature of fate as he watched the wheel turn round and round. Maybe, had I been braver, I would have asked him.
Before the “Wheel of Fortune” was a popular TV show, it was a popular symbol for Fortuna, the fickle lover who was just as quick to turn her back as she was to wrap her arms around a suitor. Cicero, the Roman statesman and philosopher, already spoke of the “Wheel of Fortune” in the First Century B.C.E. In Seneca’s play “Agamemnon,” he writes the verse, “Whatever Fortune has raised on high, she lifts but to bring low.” Everyone understood those words, king and peasant alike.
The image had staying power. It traveled through the many centuries and found its way into the Middle Ages, where it was drawn onto manuscripts and portrayed in stained glass windows in magnificent cathedrals. Its popularity was due, in no small part, to its accuracy in describing the tenuous nature of things. For that same reason–perhaps–it even persists to the present day in something as modern as a TV Game Show, where wins and losses are determined by a spin of the “Wheel of Fortune.”
Historians tell us that the wheel of fortune in its classic form was divided into four parts or four stages of life. The first was the left side called the regnabo (I shall reign), then the top part called the regno (I reign), onto the right side called the regnavi (I have reigned) and then the bottom part called sum sine regno (I have no kingdom). Four human figures corresponding to each stage usually were portrayed on the wheel. The classicists, we could say, found an apt image for the ups and downs of life.
Medieval Christian writers would take the “Wheel of Fortune” with its inexplicable instability and argue that the ever random and ever unpredictable turns of the wheel were providential, at least in the sense that all things played a part in God’s hidden plan. Similarly, Christian writers, such as Augustine and Boethius, were insistent on the part that free will played in the spin of the wheel. In so many words, God would not interfere with free will, but he would take the mess we had made and turn it into something good. We could call it the “God-writes-straight-with-crooked-lines school of thought.” Already years before, Saul of Tarsus, the sinner turned saint who suffered a head concussion after a fall from a horse, wrote from experience when he told the Romans, “We know that all things work for good for those who love God” (8.28).
I’m sure that young man dying of AIDS didn’t bother himself much with historians or with philosophers, but I also believe he became his own philosopher as he watched “Wheel of Fortune” on TV and pondered the passage of his short life and how Fortuna had shown him in a most personal way that she has no favorites, which makes her such a dangerous date. All dying men become philosophers, some better than others. The best come to see that the “Wheel of Fortune” is not just a TV show.
After the young man died, I saw some good things. I watched with tears in my eyes as the young man’s father gave his seat at the graveside to the friend who had cared for his son in his last months. Rarely have I seen such a perfect gesture of gratitude. I saw classmates come from out of state to remember the young man and his too brief stay among us. I saw the sun shine for a brief while on that December day as we bade goodbye to the flicker of light that had shone among us.
I still am haunted by that young man and his love of the “Wheel of Fortune.” If there was any show he should not have liked, it was that one. If anything, Fortuna had been most unkind to him. But maybe he didn’t see it that way. He seemed to have a smile on his face to the end. Even now, I wish I had been brave enough to ask him why he wanted to watch that show as he lay dying.
— Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 