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What Happened to Lee

(wired.com)
1298 points jgrahamc | 18 comments | 15 Apr 20 14:31 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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kick ◴[15 Apr 20 15:20 UTC] No.22878763[source]▶
This is horrifying.

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.

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1. eastdakota ◴[15 Apr 20 15:36 UTC] No.22878987[source]▶
It was incredibly sad to watch. The last time I saw him while he was still speaking — he is still alive but doesn’t speak or seem to recognize me anymore — he would repeat the same questions from the same conversation in the same order on a 30-minute loop. Over and over.

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.

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2. jamestimmins ◴[15 Apr 20 16:17 UTC] No.22879555[source]▶
I'm sorry for the loss you and his other friends/loved ones have experienced.

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

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3. eastdakota ◴[15 Apr 20 16:47 UTC] No.22879945[source]▶
Yes. Very. It was important to me and Michelle that it be a tribute to Lee’s genius and contribution to Cloudflare. We spent a long time looking for the right reporter and publication. Wired seemed appropriate given Lee’s love of technology. And Sandra was a total class act. We opened up fully to her, spending nearly a year letting her get to know us. Lee’s family was incredibly giving of their time. It takes a really talented and empathetic writer to have people feel safe and to open up to such a personal story like they did.

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.

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4. jamestimmins ◴[15 Apr 20 16:56 UTC] No.22880074{3}[source]▶
Thanks for sharing that. It sounds like first and foremost, everyone wanted to do right by their friend. That alone is touching, and I'm glad that the final article was the tribute you all hoped for. It was heartbreaking and beautiful, and was an honor to be let into the lives of everyone involved.

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.

5. radicalbyte ◴[15 Apr 20 17:06 UTC] No.22880216[source]▶
The thought of someone I love (in the broadest sense of the word) being affected by this is horrific. I'm really sorry for his family and friends :(

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.

replies(2): >>22880589 #>>22883134 #
6. hkmurakami ◴[15 Apr 20 17:23 UTC] No.22880462{3}[source]▶
Thank you for this post. It reminded me of the one line in “General Magic” where Marc Porat tells the documentary producer that the reason he agreed to make himself very available and open for the film was so that his (presumably somewhat estranged) children can get to know him and the story and the work they did, better.

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

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7. kick ◴[15 Apr 20 17:33 UTC] No.22880589[source]▶
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.

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

8. scott_s ◴[15 Apr 20 21:01 UTC] No.22883025{3}[source]▶
Thank you.
9. HeyLaughingBoy ◴[15 Apr 20 21:11 UTC] No.22883134[source]▶
Life is short and slips away quickly. Use your abilities to further the things that mean the most to you, not on a possibly misguided sense of what you "should" be doing.
replies(1): >>22884913 #
10. synaesthesisx ◴[15 Apr 20 21:30 UTC] No.22883308{3}[source]▶
This was one of the most incredibly tragic and moving pieces I've read recently, and serves as a reminder of the fragility of consciousness and being. Thank you for sharing his story.
11. thephyber ◴[15 Apr 20 22:42 UTC] No.22884003[source]▶
> I do wonder if some of his genius came from his ability to shut down some of the other noise in his life.

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

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12. caleb-allen ◴[15 Apr 20 22:49 UTC] No.22884077[source]▶
Can you expand?
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13. asveikau ◴[16 Apr 20 00:43 UTC] No.22884913{3}[source]▶
And also: have pity on the person who outwardly seems to be an asshole or checked out. You don't know what they're going through.
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14. thephyber ◴[16 Apr 20 01:46 UTC] No.22885260{3}[source]▶
Mostly due to a few small things.

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.

15. eastdakota ◴[16 Apr 20 04:44 UTC] No.22886147{4}[source]▶
Had same reaction when I saw Marc in the General Magic doc. We’d already started working with Sandra when I saw it. But think it’s part of why Marc’s story was so emotional for me. Both stories of opportunity, genius, and loss.
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16. hkmurakami ◴[16 Apr 20 06:36 UTC] No.22886778{5}[source]▶
Maybe it was the direction or the editing, but there was so much romance in it for me as a kid growing up in SV during that era. I had Misty eyes for an era mostly gone by.

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

17. miles ◴[17 Apr 20 00:24 UTC] No.22895013{4}[source]▶
Reminded me of this quote often misattributed to Plato[0]:

"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...

18. beckynot ◴[29 Apr 20 01:51 UTC] No.23014412[source]▶
That’s what I wondered too. If it was all part of a particular kind of brain. He reminded me too much of my ex-husband, also a high level programmer, and his sleep habits and growing apathy and irritability while we were together (though he might point to me as the cause). Not to say my software engineer ex has the same condition, but maybe he has a touch of it. So many of us have just a touch of something that is clinical in someone else.