A Stranger Friend

It’s some time in June or July 2022. On a crisp summer morning pre-6am I am walking as usual to the gym.

The streets are deserted save 1 or 2 cars hurtling by no longer morally restricted by the driving limits they have to adhere to during the day.

I’m approaching one of the crossings I usually take with zero thought.

But today is different.

From afar I see not just one Brazilian flag, but two of slightly different hues hanging on a railing on the opposite side.

I see some flowers.

And then I see a picture of you. Smiling with iridescent joy and happiness. A transfixing expression. Beautiful.

And I stop in my tracks because I know what this means.

You are gone and this is a memorial.

I look at you. Hard.

You look like me. If I am caramel in shade, you are tawny.

You are seated on something elevated, maybe a rock or the peak of a hill, with a beautiful landscape stretching boundlessly out behind you.

I don’t know how to describe the kind of sorrow that grips my heart in that moment, because you look young. 

Like you had so much more to give life. 

Like you came from somewhere good.

Like you were just starting.

I carry on walking but in my heart I decide I am going to get to know you better.

I wonder how you could have come to an end at such an innocuous crossing.

I think about the t-shirts with your image, the flags and the flowers, and I know that you were loved deeply.

You’re not the first tribute displayed like this that I have seen, but something about this hits differently.

Later when I get back in, I search the location in google and “accident”.

I find out that you are Gabriel Santiago, from Brazil.

You were 27 years old and had come to London with your wife Bianca. You’d been here for two years.

You had a passion for cars and motorbikes.

That when you met your end on a motorcycle, at that innocuous crossing, your friends from the biker community you belonged to, turned up in droves and decorated your transition into the next dimension with flags, flares, revvs and burnouts.

There’s a grief that is modest and mute, and there is a grief that rattles the walls of the universe with its clanging. And your friends felt the universe needed to hear the sound of you leaving in a colourful flourish. 

I have only just found out over a year later, that you were delivering urgent blood to a laboratory. 

Isn’t it funny how life works. 

In the saving, there can also be losing. 

But also sometimes nothing gets saved, and everything gets lost.

After I read those small words about you, it’s like every time I walked past those items left at your memorial, I saw your face greeting me every other morning, even as my soul would clench in sadness, it would also smile in warmth towards what felt like your spirit still lingering there.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, could have prepared me for the day, I looked over to greet you in the morning, and you were gone.

Every little last piece.

The flowers had been the first to go after a few days. But the picture and the Brazilian flag had hung on the railing for weeks. Months. Longer than usual.

I had become comfortable sharing that same innocuous crossing with you each morning before most of the world was awake. Wondering how your family was doing, if they managed to repatriate your body back to Brazil, and raise all the money they needed for that.

It’s inexplicable, but a devastating feeling of anger like hot lava slowly pouring through every vessel of my body, hit me the day I no longer saw you at our innocuous crossing. 

No photo, no flag.

Just like that life had moved on.

I didn’t know you, never spoke to you, never saw you, but in that moment I realised I was experiencing a form of indirect grief.

The removal of those items, felt like a removing of you from the history of the earth, an overwriting of your chapter to make way for new lives, new doings, new existing, new livings. 

Like you no longer deserved to share in the same moments of existing with us.

I, a stranger felt like I had lost a good friend.

And it hurt. 

Still every time I think about it, my throat seizes up.

In that moment, I decided that I was going to immortalise you the best way I knew how.

That I would write about you. How you died, because I didn’t know much about how you lived.

That I would carve your life into the annals of the universe with words, even as you may be carved into it in a headstone in your home town.

I can’t explain why that felt so important to me, other than it being a way to set free the despair that remembering how you died brought.

I kept saying I would do it. And I didn’t.

Some time passed, and one day whilst on the way to the gym, coming up to that innocuous crossing, I saw your picture tied to that railing again.

And I stopped in my tracks because I know what that meant.

It had been a year since you went to a place we living have no knowledge of.

I had never been able to cross that crossing without looking to the right and remembering you, ever, but I didn’t realise that much time had passed.

It was like feeling that initial sorrow anew. But this time tinged with a bit of guilt.

Gabriel, I hadn’t etched you into the universe like I said I would.

I thought about your wife, your family, your friends in Brazil in London still taking time to come to the spot where you were cruelly torn from them. 

Even amidst the pain it would still raise in them.

This showed me how much you were still loved.

It showed me that even though I had not written, it does not mean that you were not immortal. 

You are immortal where it matters – in hearts, in memories, in everlasting love in the souls of those who knew you.

I realised this and I found peace. 

But also I swore I would not let another year pass without immortalising you the way I know how.

I think of you smiling with iridescent joy and happiness, and even as it still crushes me how you left this realm, I think I would like to release you from the cage of my proxy grief.

Gabriel you do not know me, but you have been a stranger friend.

Your life and death reminded me how transitory our sojourn here on this earth is, and how important the impact we make is.

Your friends and your wife had the most beautiful words to say about you. Indeed, the way they spoke about your passing, it was if they had released you with peace into your next destination. 

Though full of sorrow and grief, there was an acceptance of your untimely end that took me longer to come to…

…because they knew you, 

felt you, 

loved you, 

and experienced the goodness of all you had to offer them.

So this is a goodbye of sorts.

I will never forget you, but I no longer feel so aggrieved by the passing of time since you left this universe.

I pray for your biker friends that miss you, for your wife and family who must still long for you.

In the words of those who loved you, because only they can say it best:

“God protect you. God take you to eternal rest”

Maybe we see each other on the flip side.

In memory of Gabriel Santiago (DOD: 19.07.2022)