Often one will come in and announce their disease, either expressing a hope to defeat it, or telling everybody that it likely is terminal. When the day comes, a relative or friend will often post and let us know.
I just wonder-how many have we lost that never got any sort of announcement? I guess there is no way to know for sure-does anyone have any prominent candidates?
@VinylTurnip has been MIA since June. I hope it’s simply because he’s finally cut the last remaining thread that held him captive of the SDMB and that he floated somewhere nice.*
*Yeah, that’s one of his.
He’s over on the Longneck Board.
I’m glad he’s okay, but still heartbroken. 
Ah. Slumming.
Sampiro?
An Aussie Doper, TheLoadedDog passed last year, although he hadn’t been a regular poster for a number of years before that.
A good bloke, it was very sad to hear the news.
Alive and active on FB.
You won’t hear about it when I go, I don’t think. Nobody in my real life has a clue who you are, and if it happens it’s likely to be sudden and without warning. I am sure I’m far from the only one here with that kind of situation.
I’ll tell you if I’m terminal, though.
Chiroptera disappeared abruptly off the board and we have no idea what happened to her. One of her last posts, though, was about having chest pains and going to seek medical help…
I’m sure we’ve lost a few over the years to sudden death or other abrupt calamity and we’ll never know what happened to those people.
Yes, I’m certain that’s what happened to Chowder.
Here’s a thread about that. She did log in 8 days later but didn’t post.
There is a field called actuarial science which could help you make a reasonable estimate. We have had threads about how old Dopers are. So if we know how many Dopers there are of a given age we can plug numbers into the formulas to estimate number of deaths. Suppose there are 50 Dopers 68 years old. Then we can estimate then using an actuarial life table that one died in the past 12 months:
Ref @PastTense (great username + thread combo BTW!!) 
Here’s a learned article from a few years ago about the same issue as applied to Facebook. They’ve got a slightly larger userbase than we do, but the logic is the same.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/69/
Same here. If I’m every gone more than two weeks, you can assume I’m truly gone. (you’d never catch me at any rival boards, don’t worry about that)
He’s the one I always think of. I liked him.
I remember the whole Chiroptera thing. Hope she was OK and decided not to post here any more, for whatever reason.
I know that people may abruptly stop posting because (long story made short) one of my IRL friends posted almost 20,000 times on a board which was about one of her interests, and stopped abruptly in 2010, posted one more time in 2012, and last logged on in 2015.
I’ve been part of an online roleplaying game for the last 14 years and often wonder this myself when some friends don’t come back.
Askthepizzaguy? I doubt he’s dead but didn’t he vanish suddenly?
He’s also over at Longnecks.