Goodbye Danu!

My old friend Muhammad Danu fatahillah died in a motor accident last Saturday, on his way back to Jakarta to see his sick little child.

I was never very close with him in the high school. However, I knew his photography skill, his natural leadership, and his straightforward opinions. But then, after high school, we never met again. Until a year ago, thanks to friendster and yahoo messenger, we could contact each other online. I found out that he'd just got married and blessed with a child.

The last time I chatted with him. Nothing about personal life. We chatted about work life and it seemed that something we had in common was OLAP report. He said he'd built a JPivot/Mondrian report and wanted to integrate it to a php-based portal. Meanwhile, I was doing my project in Directorate General of Tax building a monitoring report system using Cognos Power Transformer.

After that, I couldn't find a topic to talk more with him. Then it happened.

I was shocked to find out this news from Antos' post on Monday morning. I had just started yahoo messenger and new emails announcement popped out. I clicked it, and found that he just wrote a new post in his friendster blog. Then I found out that Danu didn't survive a highway crash last weekend. We human beings could not escape from God's plan. The only thing that I regretted was had I found out the news earlier I would have attended his funeral in Tanah Kusir cemetery on last Sunday.

Antos wrote a beautiful eulogy for him.

Then a line from Gie, a movie about a chinese indonesian student activist, dawned on me.

Seorang filsuf Yunani pernah menulis … nasib terbaik adalah tidak dilahirkan, yang kedua dilahirkan tapi mati muda, dan yang tersial adalah umur tua. Rasa-rasanya memang begitu. Bahagialah mereka yang mati muda.

(A greek philosopher wrote, the best destiny is being unborn, the next good thing is being born, but die young, and the unluckiest is dying of old age. It seems right. Joyful are they who die young.)