Remembering a friend

I learned this weekend that a social media friend passed away in Scotland at a young age from cancer. Although I’d never met Nick, he regaled many with stories of growing up in Hong Kong and balls at the Peace Hotel in Shanghai, where he wore a kilt.

When I traveled to Shanghai a couple years ago and stayed at the Peace Hotel, I thought about the balls he went to there–especially when I went to one. Here are a couple of photos from that ball. Nick’s mom wrote on Facebook that he guessed people wouldn’t miss him when he was gone, but she knows that he grossly underestimated how many people around the world miss his presence, even it’s online.

When I posted photos from Hong Kong in September, Nick commented on some and asked if I’d just flown there on a whim. I wrote that I’d been planning it for 3-4 months. He said he was jealous and at first I was going to write back that he should make a trip back. But I didn’t. I didn’t know he was so sick and had been battling cancer for two years already. But something stopped me from writing what first came to mind. Instead, I commented that I was jealous, too, and I was there. That was the last correspondence we had.