What Happened to Lee

Conversations soon became impossible. Lee started chattering in repetitive, unceasing loops. He would tell Kristin: “We met at Cloudflare. We got engaged in Rome. We got married in Maui, Hawaii.” He repeated it hundreds of times a day. Then the loops got shorter, more cryptic. He spoke fewer sentences, instead muttering sequences of numbers or letters.

At the same time, given the flashes of lucidity pointed out in this article, you have to wonder if others talking about his condition so much might make him feel like a walking corpse when those hit.

I’ve really struggled to wrap my mind around his condition. I don’t think it’s frustrating for him. He seems to have lost the emotion to be frustrated.

I think we all have a sense of Alzheimer’s because we’ve all forgotten something. This isn’t that. Lee’s memory, if anything, seemed to improve and he’d bring up little details from when we first worked together I’d long since forgotten. What seemed to go away was his ability to process those memories into something more.

It’s hard to imagine losing the ability to imagine. And, as his friend and colleague, it was incredibly frustrating when we just thought he was checked out. And then devastating when we learned all this time he’d actually had a disease.

I do wonder if some of his genius came from his ability to shut down some of the other noise in his life. And if the disease, for some time before it became debilitating, was almost a superpower. I’ve never met an engineer like him.

I miss him every day.

Do you feel like the article was accurate and fair to the people involved?

I got the advance copy of the article last night and it’s been an emotional 12 hours reliving a lot of the last 18 years I’ve known Lee. But I’m happy we helped create something Lee’s two sons will be able to read and see a little bit of what an incredible person their dad was.

My prayer is that while this time is emotional, the process and article also provide a degree of healing as well. Again, thanks for sharing.

I think that you're kind of right: I know one engineer who is like that and he it's his autism which makes him brilliant. He could operate in deep-thought mode all the time - he is extremely intelligent and extremely focused. There are other people who can hit it for patches - I could do it for 3-4 weeks at a time when I was 21. At 39 I struggle to do it for an hour a month (kids change you more than anything else).

We really know so little about how our minds and bodies work and that's something we need to change. We should be able to identify and fix conditions like this.

Makes me think that some of us here are wasting our abilities on start-ups and systems when we could be working on fixing much more complex systems.

Terribly sorry for you and your friends and colleagues’ loss. Thank you and everyone else for doing this for his children.

This can go in the wrong direction. Nobody wants to be McNamara, though being Zuckerberg isn't that bad.

Yes. I can think of a few examples of this.

Lee bought a few material things, but he was mostly able to live out of his backpack for years at a time, at least before he got married. He didn't have many material desires (no fancy car, clothes, or big gaming computer). He periodically lived on other people's couches (including mine) between starting university and getting married.

I remember he drove through at least a few red lights because he was in the zone deep in thought processing some coding concepts / business plans in his mind while driving. Once I noticed this, I didn't let him drive me; instead he started to code on his laptop in my passenger seat.

When we were waiting in line to rent a UHaul-type truck, he was pacing the retail waiting area thinking through some coding for a future Unspam feature. I remember it because the guy standing behind me saw him as a stranger threat and started to get anxious that Lee was pacing in a hoodie nearby. I mention it because he never concentrated much on the small daily tasks like waiting in line and mostly overloaded those tasks to optimize his long term goals (eg. startup success).

He didn't write big architecture docs (possibly the part of his work that didn't scale much), but his mental capacity to juggle lots of small facts and tasks was pretty incredible. It worked great with a small team with very low turnover. I miss those days when I just checked in with him 2-3 times a day rather than having to spend a lot of mental effort to figure out how to serialize lots of trivial stories/subtasks into Jira.

I met back with them a year later and he was very dependent upon his cell phone to look up people on Facebook, places on Google Maps, movies on IMDB, etc. (basically all nouns) in real time during the conversation to fill in the gaps in his memories. I lived with him for maybe 5-6 years and he had to look up my Facebook profile and pictures to try to pick up on any nostalgia that might catalyze a memory.

I suspect there is an underlying current of frustration, but probably not a high level cognitive realization (at least not a sudden one) that his mind is degrading.

Thanks again for your work, both on the company and the article.

"Be kind; everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."

and Patrick Farley's version from his series "The Spiders"[1]:

"Show kindness to every person you meet. No matter how ill-tempered a man may seem, you have no idea what private agony he may secretly be struggling with."

[0] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/06/29/be-kind/

[1] http://www.electricsheepcomix.com/spiders/3.5/01_hospital.ht...