Establishing a Life Line

[Sadsack]

I was thinking about Chocket the other day and wondering if she's had any further updates since she posted a few months ago. Does anyone have any direct contact information on her?
That brings up another subject. Recently we talked about everyone having at least two phone numbers and email addresses for other members here. It's tough when someone just disappears and we have no way of knowing what happened to them. It was in the context of a suicide threat.
On LB, there was a woman who'd been treated for pneumonia for months and then her doctor suddenly realized she had a rare lung cancer and not pneumonia at all. She was hospitalized and within a few days transferred to a hospice. She died 10 days later.
For nearly two months no one knew what had happened to her...everyone was asking, sending her emails, etc...it took a fair amount of reconstruction of events and communication to finally track down the information. After establishing where she lived, one member researched the papers in that area and found her obit.
It was awful. I was the last person (Morgie) to talk to her (she was in the hosp), then her cell phone was disconnected. Someone else got one email from her after that saying she went to a hospice.
Does everyone have at least two contacts established??
I also provided a close friend with a few key contacts in case anything should happen to me. He has instructions to email/call the individuals on the list.
Maybe other people can do the same. Even if I have your phone number, if it is disconnected, the trail is cold.
SS

[Kritters]

Fabulous thoughts, SS~

I have an envelope with directions to notify my 'virtual' friends as well as all the passwords, etc. to my accounts.

If people leave here because they just are moving on, I wish they would have the consideration to just let us know. I think people under rate their importance here among us. We all feel that way from time to time, but I hope everyone knows that each individual person who has taken the time to post here, even a few posts, is important to us and to the other people who are guests.
Kritts

[jonsi]

I talk to a lot of the members here on this board.

I'm worried about Nancy. And if Kritters ever disappeared from the board, I would have no way to contact her. She's so stuck up she won't give me her number! just kidding!


My old computer went out last October (?) and I went "missing" for several months. But my "morgie" friends let ya'll know I was okay and passed on the word after I made a few phone calls.

We are family.


In the white light,
~jonsi

[Kritters]

SQUEEEZZE ME?....lol....

you never ASKED me for my number...you silly!

xoxo
Kritts

[Sadsack]

Death leaves online lives in limbo (AP)
NEW YORK - When Jerald Spangenberg collapsed and died in the middle of a quest in an online game, his daughter embarked on a quest of her own: to let her father's gaming friends know that he hadn't just decided to desert them.

It wasn't easy, because she didn't have her father's "World of Warcraft" password and the game's publisher couldn't help her. Eventually, Melissa Allen Spangenberg reached her father's friends by asking around online for the "guild" he belonged to.

One of them, Chuck Pagoria in Morgantown, Ky., heard about Spangenberg's death three weeks later. Pagoria had put his absence down to an argument among the gamers that night.

"I figured he probably just needed some time to cool off," Pagoria said. "I was kind of extremely shocked and blown away when I heard the reason that he hadn't been back. Nobody had any way of finding this out."

With online social networks becoming ever more important in our lives, they're also becoming an important element in our deaths. Spangenberg, who died suddenly from an abdominal aneurysm at 57, was unprepared, but others are leaving detailed instructions. There's even a tiny industry that has sprung up to help people wrap up their online contacts after their deaths.

When Robert Bryant's father died last year, he left his son a little black USB flash drive in a drawer in his home office in Lawton, Okla. It was underneath a cup his son had once given him for his birthday. The drive contained a list of contacts for his son to notify, including the administrator of an online group he had been in.

"It was kind of creepy because I was telling all these people that my dad was dead," Bryant said. "It did help me out quite a bit, though, because it allowed me to clear up a lot of that stuff and I had time to help my mom with whatever she needed."

David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, has had plenty of time to think about the issue.

"I work in the world's largest medical center, and what you see here every day is people showing up in ambulances who didn't expect that just five minutes earlier," he said. "If you suddenly die or go into a coma, there can be a lot of things that are only in your head in terms of where things are stored, where your passwords are."

He set up a site called Deathswitch, where people can set up e-mails that will be sent out automatically if they don't check in at intervals they specify, like once a week. For $20 per year, members can create up to 30 e-mails with attachments like video files.

It's not really a profit-making venture, and Eagleman isn't sure about how many members it has — "probably close to a thousand." Nor does he know what's in the e-mails that have been created. Until they're sent out, they're encrypted so that only their creators can read them.

If Deathswitch sounds morbid, there's an alternative site: Slightly Morbid. It also sends e-mail when a member dies, but doesn't rely on them logging in periodically while they're alive. Instead, members have to give trusted friends or family the information needed to log in to the site and start the notification process if something should happen.

The site was created by Mike and Pamela Potter in Colorado Springs, Colo. They also run a business that makes software for online games. Pamela said they realized the need for a service like this when one of their online friends, who had volunteered a lot of time helping their customers on a Web message board, suddenly disappeared.

He wasn't dead: Three months later, he came back from his summer vacation, which he'd spent without Internet access. By then, the Potters had already had Slightlymorbid.com up and running for two weeks.

A third site with a similar concept plans to launch in April. Legacy Locker will charge $30 per year. It will require a copy of a death certificate before releasing information.

Peter Vogel, in Tampa, Fla., was never able to reach all of his stepson Nathan's online friends after the boy died last year at age 13 during an epileptic seizure.

A few years earlier, someone had hacked into one of the boy's accounts, so Vogel, a computer administrator, taught Nathan to choose passwords that couldn't be easily guessed. He also taught the boy not to write passwords down, so Nathan left no trail to follow.

Vogel himself has a trusted friend who knows all his important login information. As he points out, having access to a person's e-mail account is the most important thing, because many Web site passwords can be retrieved through e-mail.

Vogel joked that he hoped the only reason his friend would be called on to use his access within "the next hundred years or so" would be if Vogel forgets his own passwords.

But, he said, "as Nathan has proven, anything can happen any time, even if you're only 13."

[carla]

Nancys been in touch, Jonsi .
Shes ok .
xx