The second event touched me very personally. The advent of good communications almost anywhere in the world means that I was in contact with so many friends through Facebook and the rest. So many I do not hear from regularly but I got a message from a distant friend, Graeme, on the island of St Kitts – only a few hundred kilometres to the east of me. It simply said “Sorry to get in touch this way, but have you heard about Edsel?”
It’s never a good message to get, and I thought of all kind of reasons why he asked. I said no. I had talked with Edsel through Skype a few days before I left the UK. He was heading to St Lucia to talk to some clients there about a sort of sat nav app he was looking at. We were saying how we had not caught up in a while and were looking at a couple of options for new work together, as we often did. I’d said I would follow up with him after I got back from Haiti and we were planning to meet up in Jamaica later on that year at a conference.
Graeme replied “I’m hearing that he has died.”
Of all the scenarios that had run through my mind this was the one I had dismissed as being the least likely. Graeme himself had no confirmation but had heard something on the old familiar Caribbean grapevine. I reached out to Eduardo who was living in St Kitts at the time. After a couple more hours he came back and confirmed it to me. Edsel had arrived in St Lucia OK but had suffered an almighty heart attack; he never recovered.
Edsel in St Vincent
When I Went To 