Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

May 18 is my brother’s birthday but now I'll remember it for one more thing. Last Sunday, I was still in bed at 12:02pm when I get my first text message for the day. I remember even telling my roommate, “Who the heck could it be this time?” until I read the four words: “Jorge is gone now.”

Jorge was a batch ahead of me in college, although he was a year younger. He was that smart, having been accelerated two years sometime in his early schooling.

We were only co-teachers for a year. During that time, and actually even during our college years, students mistook us for brothers because we shared the same family name, and his middle initial was the same as that of my given name, and we were both computer geeks. Heck we both even courted the smartest girl in my class, but not at the same time.

He started his own computer company with seven other batch mates. I saw him working on his resignation letter, and I said I’d go with him. I continued teaching, but he gave me two part-time programming jobs in the next two years, which was for Intel, before they got their own programmers (a position which I applied to years later, but that’s another story).

I only saw him very infrequently in the intervening years, when he had gotten rounder, seemingly emulating his favorite comic strip characters in Pugad Baboy. He was also a consummate Star Trek fan, as the last time I remember seeing him he was wearing a Next Generation cap and holding the Starlog magazine that detailed all the episodes so far.

That was during the birthday party of another co-teacher of mine, who was also his business partner in operating taxicabs and promoting their high school books. My mom actually thought I was the one who co-authored the book because of the similarity in our names.

It was through this co-teacher that we heard about what happened to him. He had started losing weight rapidly, and it was attributed to diabetes, although my co-teacher suspected it was to cover up for something.

That something turned out to be a brain infection. For a high-paid programmer he still rode the bus going home. One night he fell asleep during the ride and woke up from the sudden stop having bumped his head on something: the window frame, the glass, who knows.

His mistake was he neglected it until he started getting headaches which was the unattended wound now eating through his skull. Last New Year’s Eve he had an operation that left a 5 cm hole in his cranium.

He was on the road to recovery, but I heard of new symptoms he suffered: a tic that made one of his eyes blink uncontrollably, being completely bedridden, and finally last week, slipping into a coma.

Can’t help but think how it could just as easily have been me.