It's an educated guess.

If something had happened seriously to him, his family would be attending to it on a practical level. If so, I'd have expected them to have contacted someone already in the online community via his emails or by his direction. That expectation may be wrong, but you'd expect him to at least shoot a message out somehow already.

So either something extremely bad has happened and news hasn't got out, or he'll bounce back in some way. I think the latter. Furthermore, by the removal of NM's submissions of NickB, there could be a _why scenario: maybe he's wanting to rearrange his life: hopefully for positive reasons.

OTOH if something serious has happened, we could provide emotional support: but he might not want that.