Most of you should be familiar with the colorful frequent poster known simply as typo. I'll immediately say that he is known to tell tall tales, and it is difficult for people to tell fact from fiction in conversation with him. In recent weeks he had been commenting openly in threads about having a terminal illness. Beforehand, I had already had some private conversations with him ... since otherwise, many threads would be derailed beyond anything conscionable.
Personally, I think he tends to meld fact with fiction. I don't think it is all tall tails/exaggerations, and even if they were, I figured that even if the chance was small that he could really have a terminal illness, and based on his repeated public statements about basically having no friends, I figured it would only be right for me to try to be supportive and conversational with him in difficult times.
In more recent times, much of our private conversations have at least touched on the topics of death, the afterlife, and how he was feeling that day. Most days, it seems, even in threads, he would say that he couldn't manage to get out of bed that day. Some days he seemed happy to just be able to sit up and eat. In the last few days in which he was still logging into this site and responding to my messages, he made them substantially shorter, and less frequent, noting at least once that he wasn't feeling well enough to respond that day and had to keep it short.
Now, maybe some of the more antagonistic were right and typo doesn't say a single thing that's true. Maybe he just went on an extended vacation and/or lost interest for a while, as many do, but without going into detail (for his privacy), the last message he sent to me has been haunting me since. He sent it on the last day that he logged in, June 10th.
I got a bad feeling once a week had gone by and he hadn't been on again, but I thought that some other explanation was still most likely at the time. It has now been almost one full month with no change, and it feels wrong for things to just end so abruptly if he truly may have succumbed. Since he always said he had no friends, you would think somebody, somewhere, who knew him might appreciate knowing that at least some other people (maybe some others in this community) cared about him as a person. That makes the feeling of dread all the worse, that someone who seemed to have been pretty active on here for many years, who may not have had many friends, may simply have passed without anybody here ever noticing.
This being the internet, this does happen, of course, and we'll rarely ever hear about it. I know that Soarer has been missing, without explanation, for years, for example.
What do you guys think? Could he have passed? Could it just be a long game trolling stunt? Has he vanished before? I swear I had seen posts from him almost every single day since I joined this forum. Regardless of what may be, I would rather people wonder and/or leave a nice comment should he never return than have him vanish without a thought. Please be respectful.
He was always nice to me, even supportive. I don't know whether he lived/lives in a 30-story mansion filled with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of custom/rare keyboards or an apartment in the local YMCA. I think his heart's always been in the right place though, and I hope that my gut instinct is wrong about where he's gone.
