This just happened today so I don't know what plans his family has. He has a cousin and an aunt, and that's about it, and neither has an email they can be reached at. So far as his products go, they will apparently remain up until they just drop off the system. Anyone who buys something will basically just give paypal the money since there is no way for anyone to log in and do anything with his account.

Someone said he had been depressed, and i agree. The last 5 months I hadn't seen him much since it's my busy time at work, but the rest of the year i'm hanging almost daily at his crib. I too noticed some real problems with him over the past year. He did seem depressed, he slept weird hours (all day somtimes), his moods were weird, he was always stressing to cover the bills, and he just--for lack of a better way to say it--seemed to be losing touch with the world. He refused my offer of some antibiotics, didn't want me to come over to check on him, stubbornly refused to go to the doctor, I've been told, and went instead to his cousin's to try and get better from what he thought was a severe allergy problem. I too have been having a bad cough for 6 months from the bad air here, and in Billy's case it seems that whatever he had turned into pneumonia (or so we think, but we don't know).

I am so pissed off at myself because I didn't realize how sick he was. He phoned me last saturday to say he was going to his cousin's, asked me to IM his girlfriend about that, and he sounded so bad I didn't even recognize his voice and told him he had the wrong number! I thought it was just the allergies, and that he'd get better after he got out of his house. YOU JUST DON'T THINK SOMEONE WHO'S BEEN A PART OF YOUR LIFE FOR 25 YEARS COULD ACTUALLY BE DYING!

Had I but known how serious the thing was, I would have done SOMETHING to help him. But I just could not imagine it could be that serious. Learn from my mistake, folks: If you've got a friend who's really sick and won't go to the dr, call 911 if you have to.

I found out about this from his friend steve, who was called by the cousin. He too is really down because he had a whole bottle of penicillin he could have given Billy, but he didn't know he was sick. From what the cousin says, Billy just leaned over today on the bed and died this morning.

His online girlfriend still doesn't kno, tho I emailed her. I hated to tell her like that but there was no other way.

He was always doing this forum stuff when I was over, and I know he really loved some of the people here like Lynn White and Ginny (I'm afraid I don't know the other people he interacted with).

I do hope, as someone said, that he has a wonderful house somewhere beyond.