What Happened to Lee

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.

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.