Daniel

I left Mexico 15 years ago last week. That blows my mind. It seems like…well, maybe not yesterday. But not 15 years ago. I don’t keep in touch with many of my Mexican friends, I’m sorry to say. I guess life is too busy here to worry about there. I do have an annual-ish catch up with Daniel, a former student. He worked for a plastics company that I gave classes to on Wednesdays and Fridays, 7am to 9am. It was one of the first classes I ever had, and it lasted till the week I left. There were usually about five or six in the class. Daniel was about my age. A couple of years older. We would go out mid class for a smoke together. And we both kept turtles. When I left, I gave him four of mine, including Bob, my favourite.

Once a year, more or less, we’d have an online chat. And on my two visits back to CDMX, we met up for breakfast, along with Maria Elena. She was also in the class. They lived near each other and drove in to work together. One time he messaged to let me know Bob had been killing things. Another time we had a video call - Bob had passed away after lunch. I thought to myself  last week that I hadn’t heard from Daniel for a while. So I brought up his Facebook profile to get to our messages. And there it was. The Facebook pop up, “Remembering Daniel Ramirez” He’d died. It turns out I hadn’t heard from him in about two and a half years, and for good reason. He’d died just a few weeks after our last chat. 

I’ve felt pretty sad about it. He was a really nice guy. It kinda brings my former Mexico life to a bit of a close. I’ll not hear about my other three turtles are faring again. I don’t have contact details for Maria Elena. She must have retired. I could leave a message on his Facebook page, as a tribute. That’s a nice feature. Would that be a good idea? I don’t know. It seems to just be family that have left tributes. I’ll think about it. 

Did you know that the world’s largest cemetery is in Iraq. It holds up to twenty million bodies. Twenty million lives lived, stories told, all mostly forgotten. But you know, I think Facebook must have surpassed it. Everyone thought Facebook was growing a community, but all along it’s really been building a giant, almost infinite graveyard.