Yesterday’s evening I’d learnt that a colleague of mine from TOI company, Rostyslav T. has suddenly died a couple of days ago, this Tuesday.
I’m still unable to wrap my head about it. I knew him for over a decade, since I started doing my first projects with the company.
He died from a blood cloth, a thrombus.
It wasn’t some ruzzian aggression, just bad health and luck. Rostyslav was in his late fifties, which is very early.
What makes it all hard to believe is the fact that very often death happens all of a sudden. It could be just yesterday you talked with someone, being unaware that was your last time.
I’ve seen him a couple of weeks ago. And since I’m not a frequent visitor to the office, for me it’s like yesterday. I was too busy with my server back in the office, and I was willing to finish before we leave office, so I talked with him just a couple of minutes. The usual chit-chat of how-are-yous-hows-the-kids.
It feels like not long ago we’ve been working through the work of his passed colleague.
But it was almost 5 years ago!
I did not know the guy. All I had is his laptop, and I worked through it to learn what his iPhone password could be. After some attempts, I was lucky to succeed. To Rostyslav it was both the great surprise and the very casual thing. He believed I did a very complex hackery, but he also was like ‘I had no doubts in your abilities.’
When it was rather a social engeneering job. I worked through his emails, his communications, and found out the repetitive things that could happen to be his password. He used the same numbers here and there, they turned out to be the password we’ve been looking for.
The processes in the company aren’t perfect, so that sudden death generated a massive amount of extra work. A lot of which became mine too.
I have no idea about this time, I expect it would be difficult for the company, he did a lot of work. Again, I’m going to cover some of it, at least the first months.
He was an early bird, and I always liked that. I am an early bird too. When we worked together, he was angry at me for coming to the office after 1 pm. He wasn’t seriously angry, but I still always apoligised for that, reminding him that I have little kids (they weren’t visiting pre-school back then), and it’s not like I’ve been sleeping till midday.
These days, I’m able to visit the office since 10 am, which is significantly earlier than before. But we had less work together, these last couple of years. So Rostyslav didn’t enjoy my new schedule.
He had a sense of humour I enjoyed, that’s what I meet not very often.
I have never seen him visiting bomb shelter. I remember the first year of the big war (since Feb 24, 2022), everyone was scared. His reaction to the Air Raid Alerts was ‘oh, fuck it already.’
I remember one time, I was at the office. The one that located in the industrial area. There was an air alert, we had them quite often at the time. And here is Rostyslav casually saying ‘ah, we had some missiles hit over there’ and pointing with his finger. He wasn’t making up stuff to scare me, his tone was rather ‘oh, we all are gonna die one day, so just fuck it.’
From my times at the office, I’ve got that impression that he was doing the massive amount of job. And quite very often he made all the job the CEO should have been doing. They worked together, and Rostyslav was the deputy director.
The director wasn’t too busy with work. Maybe, that’s the accomplishment for the CEO, I bet it is.
I’m sure his death would be a great loss for the company. But I also know that it would be a much greater loss for his family. He was a great husband, a great dad, and a grandfather. I didn’t know his family personally, but that’s I can tell from how he talked about all them.
We are the memories that live in other people. We live till we are remembered. It’s just sad our physical bodies leave earlier.
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