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How the personality of a brilliant young programmer was destroyed

With his programs, Lee Holloway has laid the foundations of Cloudflare, a company specializing in Internet security. But over time, he became apathetic, unpredictable, estranged from everyone - and for a long time no one could understand what happened to him.




On Friday, September 13, 2019, Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlin, co-founders of San Francisco’s Internet security company Cloudflare, stood on a narrow marble balcony overlooking the New York Stock Exchange. A flock of company directors crowded next to Prince, ready to count down out loud. “Louder! Louder! - called them Prince. - Five! Four! Three! .. ”Exactly at 9:30 the founders reached for the famous bell of the exchange, marking the beginning of the trading day, as well as the release of their 10-year-old company on the exchange. So they changed their lives and hit the jackpot. At that moment they were enriched by millions of dollars.

More than a hundred employees and investors, who were standing downstairs on the ground floor, burst out with joyful screams, and their raised phones photographed what was happening. Christine Holloway, employee # 11, looked up at the balcony, took some photographs, and then sent them through her messenger to her husband, Lee Holloway, the third co-founder of the company. He was at home at that time, in California. From time to time, a familiar face popped out of the crowd to tell her, "Lee should have been here."



In the early years of Cloudflare, Lee Holloway worked as a hired genius: a person who could spend hours concentrating on a task, pouring code from his fingertips while death metal rattled on his headphones . He was the chief architect with ideas that turned a sketch made literally on a napkin into a tech giant with 1,200 employees and 83,000 customers. He laid the foundations of a system that currently processes more than 10% of all Internet requests and blocks billions of cyber threats daily. Most of the architecture he conceived is still in operation.

But a few years before going public, his behavior began to change. He lost interest in colleagues and projects. During the meetings I did not pay attention to what was happening. His colleagues noticed how he became less accommodating and more aggressive, resisted other people's ideas, and ignored feedback.

Rudeness Lee confused his old friends. He devoted his whole life to Cloudflare, and once even promised not to get a haircut until his website’s web traffic surpassed Yahoo traffic (it took several months and 10 cm of hair). He was always good-natured, gladly helped his colleagues and dined with them. At the Zatlin birthday party, he charmed a group of children, entertaining them with stories about the joys of programming. Lee seemed simply incompatible with things like quarrels.

He gradually became more and more unpredictable. Some colleagues were surprised when Lee divorced his first wife and soon got married to one of his colleagues. They decided that his success and wealth hit him in the head. “We all just decided that he made a lot of money, married a new girl,” says Prince. “That he rethought his life and became a goat.”

People close to him felt how he rejected them. They thought he decided to get rid of the past. But in fact, he did not make such a decision. Over the next few years, Lee changed more and more and gradually turned into a person whom the closest people simply could not recognize. And it took several years to search for the reasons for such changes - and the search results forced his family to face the most difficult questions about what a person is.

On the first floor of the exchange that September morning, Lee's younger brother, Alaric, was in a state of quiet panic all morning. He took a selfie with the first employees of the company, and sent pictures through a messenger to his brother. Alaric did not work for Cloudflare, and few knew there. However, his dark hair lay on his forehead just like his brother’s, and on his elongated triangular face were the same dark eyes and olive skin. “It was very strange,” says Alaric. “People looked at me as if they knew me.”

In the house of his parents in San Jose, 38-year-old Lee could not find a place. He walked through the rooms and corridors of a 140-square-meter house. m in a circle that he trod since he moved to them two years ago. He did not speak. His parents watched TV, and called him every time they saw Prince or Zatlin on the screen.

He later used a family-owned set-top box to search YouTube for Cloudflare videos. Then he resumed his circle: he walked around the rooms, muttered something under his breath, ate cashew nuts.


Lee Holloway Spends Time With His Youngest Son In His Home On California's Central Coast

* * *

What makes you a unique person? Such a question relates to the very essence of personality, to what makes us unique in this universe. The opposite question raises a different kind of philosophical dilemma: if a person is not in himself, then who is he?

Countless philosophers have tried to break this elusive egg. In the 17th century, John LockeHe equated a person with a person’s memory, and his memories with a thread connecting his past with the present. Intuitively, this point of view seems very convenient: after all, most of us perceive a continuous existence precisely with the help of memory. However, the memory is unreliable. In the 1970s, the recognized philosopher Derek Parfit redid the idea of ​​Locke, and argued that individuality appears due to a more complex process - the perception of psychological coherence stretched over time. He suggested that a whole set of mental phenomena - memory, intentions, beliefs, and so on - make those chains that connect us with our personality in the past. In today's man, many psychological conditions coincide with those of the same person yesterday. Yesterday’s man has a similar intersection with the same man two days ago.Each memory or belief is a chain stretching back in time and holding a person together in the face of inevitable changes.

The bottom line is that each person is himself because his countless mental characteristics do not change day by day, which keeps his personality from changing over time. This definition is less strict than the old definition of the soul, and it does not provide a clear threshold, crossing which the person breaks. She does not talk about how many psychological chains can be lost before you stop being yourself. Neurobiology also gives only a partial answer to what makes a person unique.

Neural networks encode our mental characteristics, which form the foundation of behavior. The stimulus enters the brain, electrochemical signals travel through your neurons, leading to the action: hug a friend. Sit and meditate. Look at the sun and smile. The loss of several brain cells is not a big disaster; the networks are stable enough to preserve human behavior and self-awareness.

But not always. If you influence this biological jelly in a certain way, then the personality structure will demonstrate its fragility.

Lee’s personality lasted for decades - and then stopped doing it.

From an early age, he could hold spreading structures in his head. He grew up in Cupertino in the 1990s, where Lee's father worked for Apple, so his son had access to the latest computers. Lee often cut computer games with his brother. Among his friends he was known as a legendary player: he assessed difficult situations, changed strategies and won match after match. And this was not only in video games. His childhood friend Justin Powell recalls how Lee came from a street to a high school chess club tournament. He was not a member of this club, but won the tournament. He managed not to turn into an unbearable person, as he expressed his cunning through sarcastic comments. “Watching a movie with him was like watching another episode of '' The Mysterious Theater of 3000'' Says Powell [an American comedy show where characters sarcastically comment on the worst science fiction films of the 1950s and 1960s / approx. transl.]. “His very presence prompted you to try to keep up with his flight of thoughts.”

Lee and his friends often dragged computers to each other's houses to play games together. He soon became interested in computers as such and began to study computer science - first in high school, then at a local community college and at the University of California at Santa Cruz, where a chain of unlikely events connected him with Matthew Prince.

Then Prince was a young entrepreneur worn with the idea of ​​an anti-spam program. At the University of California at Santa Cruz, he met professor of computer science Arthur Keller. Keller and his students were already working on a very similar concept. Prince and Keller agreed on a joint patent with Keller students. One of them was Lee, and Prince hired him right away. “I had no idea that this training project could turn into something much more,” Lee later said in a video interview with the Founderly group.



Prince founded Unspam Technologies in Park City, Utah, a couple of kilometers from a cluster of hills where he could indulge in his passion for skiing. Lee moved to the basement with Prince, and first worked for food and lodging. However, Lee and other Unspam programmers soon became bored; they started launching third-party projects, including Project Honey Pot, which tracks spammers sifting through the network for information. And that’s all he did - he collected and published the data of spammers, but he did not interfere with their activities. However, this project quickly gained a fan base.

In 2007, Prince left Utah for Harvard Business School, and Lee moved to California with his girlfriend, Alexander Carey. They met students when she was an assistant teacher in computer architecture. Lee often dabbled on that course, and once scribbled some children's scribbles on films for the projector. Alexander was amused by this, but their relationship began to develop only at the end of college. They lived in different cities, but began to get closer due to the Savage multiplayer video game and the chat built into it. When Lee left Utah, it seemed natural to him that he would move to Alexandra. They got married in 2008.

Lee and Prince worked remotely at Unspam, each in their own city, and when Prince graduated from business school, Lee called him to let him know about the job offers he was considering. Instead, Prince made another, bold proposal: he and his classmate, Michel Zetlin, came up with an idea for a startup, which, it seems, had great potential. What if they expand Project Honey Pot so that it not only recognizes spammers and hackers, but also reflects their attacks? They planned to create a large network of servers around the world, convince website owners to redirect their traffic through these servers, and collect enough data to distinguish between malicious and ordinary requests. Such a system could help stop even the largest denial of service attacks [Denial of Service or DoS attack]. But Prince needed a co-founder, techie, and his co-worker, who was about to quit, was his main candidate.

Prince spoke for nearly an hour. At the end of this speech, silence reigned on Lee's side. “I said something like 'Are you still here?' - recalls Prince. “And he answered: Yes, it should work, let's try.” And so it all began.

They sketched a demo, and at the end of 2009 received more than $ 2 million worth of investments from two venture capital firms. This was enough to rent an office, converted from a two-room apartment, located above the nail salon in Palo Alto, where they could begin to actively develop their idea. Lee appeared daily in the office wearing the same Calvin Klein jeans, a leather jacket and a knitted hat, dragging a giant ThinkPad laptop under his arm, nicknamed The Beast. “We had a common idea,” said Zatlin. “And Lee was her architect.” He was obsessed with her. ”

The following year, Prince won a TechCrunch Disrupt competition in which startups fought for the opportunity to get an investment. As the competition approached, Prince and Zatlin became increasingly worried. Lee missed many working days due to migraines. It seemed that he did not even come close to completing the demo version. When the day of competition came, Prince and Zatlin took to the stage, praying that the program they represented would really work.

Prince began his presentation. “My name is Matthew Prince, this is Michelle Zatlin, and in the background is Lee Holloway. The three of us are co-founders of Cloudflare, ”he said, pointing up. Lee was backstage at this time, frantically correcting errors from a long list. Running the program, Prince held his breath, and she magically earned. In fact. An hour after entering the scene, Cloudflare gained 1,000 new customers, doubling its customer base.

In the Disrupt competition, they finished second. “In the next couple of weeks, almost mythical figures from the world of venture capital investments, about which we heard and read articles, called us,” says Prince. Under this load of attention that had fallen on them, Prince, Holloway, and one of the first employees of Sri Rao, constantly made corrections to the program so that the system did not fall apart. “We launched it in September and have already served 10,000 websites in a month,” Lee told Founderly in an interview. “If I knew, we would have adapted eight data centers, not five.”

In the wake of the growing number of customers, another of the company's first programmers, Ian Pai, dragged a toaster into the office, put an Arduino in it and connected it to the network. As soon as a new website subscribed to Cloudflare services, the toaster played the music composed by Pai. “It was horrible in terms of security,” says Pye. “But what would they do - hacked our toaster?” The toaster stood in the office for two weeks, and then he began to play music too often and annoy everyone, so they turned it off.

Cloudflare grew very fast, and Lee worked for a long time, sometimes from his home in Santa Cruz. They had a son with Alexandra. In the first months of his life, Lee and Alexander still found time to play video games together. Alexandra recalls how angry she was when Lee expropriated a pillow for breastfeeding, starting to put it under her head, sitting at a computer. Once a week, his old friends came to him to play the board version of Game of Thrones or the multiplayer game Team Fortress 2. Alexandra concentrated on the child, but did not forget to provide food for the players. “I did it for him,” she says.

In the region of 2011, she began to notice that Lee began to move away from her and form strange new habits. For example, he slept more time. After particularly long working days, he entered the door, took off his shoes and fell to sleep right on the floor. Sometimes their cat curled up on his chest. Their son, who was not yet two years old, climbed through it, trying in vain to wake him up to play.

Lee refused to go to parties where he was invited. Alexandra began to go to the weddings of their mutual friends alone. She was unpleasant that everyone around had a couple, and the chair next to her remained empty. At home, she could cook dinner, after which Lee, looking at him, informed him that he would order pizza. During a week-long family trip to France, he spent three days sleeping in the hotel room. “I said: What is happening, because we were going to go there, are you going?” - says Alexandra. He claimed that he was too tired. She was finishing preparations for the diploma, at the same time coping with caring for the child, so she, too, was tired. Alexandra begged him to go to the doctor and begged him to play with his son, but he was not interested. “After a while, you just get used to the kind of person you live with,” she says.

In 2012, Alexandra told him she was going to take an internship in Southern
California at NASA, and plans to take her son with her. According to her, in response, he calmly asked her for a divorce before the county. “I was crushed. I said: Maybe you shouldn’t do that, she recalls. “He said no, it's worth it.”

When Lee told Prince and Zatlin about the divorce, they informed him that they were shocked by this fact and offered their condolences, but Lee seemed to barely notice what was happening. To Prince and Zatlin, his behavior seemed extremely strange. However, they still came up with an explanation for him. Relationships end for many reasons. Alexandra and Lee got married at a young age, worked a lot - maybe they just split apart. In addition, Lee excelled at work, so they did not put pressure on him.


Lee, and his Cloudflare co-founders, Michelle Zatlin and Matthew Prince, at a party in 2011.

A few months after Alexandra left, Lee sat at the table with a couple of colleagues, including Christine Tarr, who worked in Cloudflare communications. She just recently published a post on the company’s blog describing how users of the service can enable two-factor authentication. Lee turned to her and said, “I read your blog post. It turned out very well. ” Her friend drew attention to this, and, joking, said: Do you flirt!

Lee and Christine began to spend more time together. At one of her first dates, Lee took her to a concert by his beloved Swedish metal band Opeth. He instilled in her an interest in basketball and they became zealous fans of the Golden State Warriors team and watched all their games. Kristin brought her interests and energy to this relationship. She convinced him to change the old jeans and leather jacket uniforms to more fashionable Rag & Bone t-shirts. He continued to wear knitted hats and hoodies anyway, but now he bought them at Lululemon, where Christine, a runner, earned extra money on weekends as a brand representative. Sometimes he refused to get out of bed or referred to a headache; Christine in response signed him for the 5 km race and persuaded him to train. Their colleagues were amazed at how athletic their lead engineer had become.

A few months later they came together. She carried him with her on all kinds of trips, tearing him away from the computer and her favorite video games. They were tubing on the Truckee River. They played endlessly Board games! and “Colonizers” with desktop buffs from work. They were both shortsighted, so they pretended to be moles, comfortably settling in their house-hole. With increasing prosperity, they renewed their place of residence, from hole-hole to hole-tower, and then to the hole-terrace. They came up with animal roles for their friends; Prince was a mongoose, and the other director was a swan. In May 2014, Christine left Cloudflare, and the next day they went on vacation to Italy. In Rome they got engaged.

At work, Lee still remained the best programmer. At the end of the summer of 2014, he started a project that earned Cloudflare the first portion of its Internet fame: the company began encrypting sites for free (while encryption of company sites is not standard).

Lee agreed to write the necessary software by the end of September. As the deadline approached, Prince molested Lee with questions, but he only waved away. Then, on the eve of the planned release of the new system, he pulled the hood deeper on his head, put on his headphones and sat down to type the code.

It was Sunday, but the office was full of people waiting for someone to announce the release of the program, someone for delivery of food and coffee. However, the main event was Lee's workflow. “And he sits, prints and prints, and no one, I think, would dare to distract him,” says John Graham-Cumming, who worked as a programmer then, and today as Cloudflare’s CTO. "The hood on his head, he's in the stream, he's practically doing something like neurosurgery."

Then, late in the evening, Lee got up. He announced that he had finished work and left. “It happened like this: live-live-live-click, click-to-click, I'm done!” - says Graham-Cumming.

Other engineers immediately began to critically analyze his code. By morning, the process of catching bugs was complete. Gambit worked, and all current customers of the company suddenly turned on encryption. It was a moment of pride. Graham Cumming says: “The size of encrypted internet doubled in a night.”


Lee and his wife, Christine Holloway, on vacation in Rome in 2014. A few hours after this shot, he proposed to her.

In preparation for the wedding, Lee decided to deal with his long-ignored health problem. Lee had congenital heart disease, aortic valve insufficiency, and some doctors thought it was one of the causes of headaches. “You could hear this defect if you put your ear to his chest,” says Christine. “We called it a champing heart.” Doctors divided the severity of the disease, but in January 2015, a Stanford surgeon insisted on immediate surgery. Lee underwent a six-hour procedure. Lying in a hospital bed, he recorded a video for his son: “I love you! I’ll see you soon, and I will have a new heart! ” He smiled and waved at the end of the recording.

Today, Christine considers this operation a turn for the worse. Lee’s heart strengthened, but his mind never recovered. He was constantly sleeping. He took leave from work for the duration of the operation, but then extended it for a month, then another one, and returned to the office only at the end of spring.

In June, they married in Hawaii, in the presence of a whole crowd of friends and relatives. Christine noticed his depression - as if someone had washed away all the colors from his personality. Prince also noticed this, but attributed everything to a slow recovery after surgery.

Shortly afterwards, Lee and Christine traveled to Europe, spent a few days in France, just like Lee and Alexandra a few years before. Christine was in Paris for the first time, and with enthusiasm sought to explore this city. However, in the end, she had to do it alone, since Lee slept in a hotel room all day. “It's so weird,” Christine recalls her thoughts. During a trip to Italy, he crawled out of bed with great activity, went to museums and cafes, and walked. She was puzzled, but his behavior was constantly explained - either in connection with migraines, then in connection with his heart disease.

In the office, working with him became increasingly difficult. He was frustrated in public, and in meetings he could detach himself from what was happening and play on the phone. At one meeting, Prince wrote him a text message: “Are you playing a game? People see everything. ” And then: "Behavior unworthy of a leader."

Prince and Zetlin turned to him with complaints about his behavior, and he promised to reform. But his reaction seemed somehow detached. “We wondered why he was so detached? Why doesn't he care? ” - recalls Zetlin. She decided that he burned out at work. And still, it was unpleasant - it seemed that Lee decided to break up with them. She studied the stories of quarreling startup creators, and how the confusion surrounding these breaks often led to company closures. "And I thought that, probably, that's how it is perceived from the inside."

They systematically tried to improve the work of their friend. Once a week, Zatlin and Prince tried to reach out to him. But nothing helped. “For several years in a row,” says Prince, “I couldn’t find a place for myself because my loyalty to this man was faced with the fact that he was becoming an ever-growing goat.”

As a result, in 2016, they decided that Lee should leave the company. “And he just said something like: yeah, that's right,” says Prince. In July, they threw him a farewell party. Prince thanked him in a farewell speech, while tears streamed down his cheeks. Lee stood next to him with a can of beer and a faint smile on his face.


Lee (center) surrounded by Thanksgiving relatives in 2016; from left to right: his brother Alaric, wife Christine, his eldest son, his mother Kathy, his youngest son and his father Randon.

Now, without work, Lee was constantly asleep. Kristin was in her seventh month of pregnancy, and they agreed that after giving birth, Lee would look after the baby, at least until he decides what to do next. In the meantime, they were going to live on Christine's savings and salary from her new job at a technology company.

However, Lee’s actions were becoming weirder. He watched Home Alone for several nights in a row. He walked all day in a knitted cap, pulling it lower and lower on his head. During childbirth, Lee slept through most of the two-day process, first at home, and then in the hospital. Waking up, he began to insist, against the will of Christine, to abolish epidural anesthesia, because of which he quarreled with one of the doctors. Mother Christine says that after giving birth, the doctor took her aside and said that she had never seen her future father behave this way. Kristin Lee expressed dissatisfaction with his behavior, and he promised to improve.

But during the dizzying first months of parental care, he could not do this. He was constantly sleeping. Sometimes after Christine cooked him dinner, he refused it and ordered himself a burrito. “I thought what was going on? - says Christine. “Everything seemed very strange and out of control.”

Confused by Li's lack of interest in her son, she decided to pretend to be a normal couple. When she failed to convince him to engage with his son, she decided to be content with the illusion of it. When Lee was lying on the couch, she could bring him a baby, and take photos of what was happening on the phone. She laughed at the baby while Lee was messing with him. However, after giving him no more than a minute of paternal adoration, he suddenly passed it on to Christine.

She tried to understand what was going on in his head, and he kept repeating, "I will be corrected." And the similarity of his answers seemed mechanical to her. It was strange to see how he now touched every tree they passed by. “At heart, I probably understood that something was wrong,” says Christine. She thought he might havepost-traumatic stress disorder after surgery, or that he might have another episode of depression. She begged him to go with her to a psychologist. And only when she was getting ready to return to work and threatened that she would leave him, did Lee agree.

At a reception with a family psychologist, Kristin cried openly and said that her husband was not interested in their child. “But Lee did nothing,” she recalls, and she did not understand why he was not trying to console her. Suddenly he got up, announced that he had forgotten to return the toilet key to his place, and left the room to do this, having returned a few minutes later.

At the end of maternity leave, Kristin hired a nanny and went back to work, but her anxiety was constantly growing. She began dating all the doctors she could think of while Lee spent days in bed. “And so I begged him to get out of bed, get into the car, and at the same time tried to make sure that my son would be with the nanny, and someone would replace me at work,” and then dragged him from one doctor to another. “And so it went on for three months.”

In mid-March 2017, Christine and Lee visited a neurologist to find out the results of an MRI of the brain. Kristin seemed that initially a neurologist was skeptical of her concern. Lee was young, healthy, and sociable.

But the MRI scan showed a completely different picture - the neurologist reported that she had discovered brain atrophy that was not appropriate for the patient’s age. Kristin asked me to explain what this means, and the doctor said that it was some kind of neurodegenerative disease , but more tests would be needed to make an accurate diagnosis. One of the doctors suggested they go to the Center for Memory and Aging at the University of California, San Francisco.

In the evening, Christine began to actively seek information. She went to the center’s website and began to read a description of diseases associated with brain atrophy. She immediately realized that the neurologist was right. And then she saw their future: the disease would kill her husband.

She recalls sitting in the evening with her son. “Until that moment, I had hope. We had the resources, the best doctors, I could even send him on a plane to some clinic, ”she says. “But to get into a situation where nothing can be done ... It's terrible.” The next day she quit.

A few weeks later, Christine and Lee, their parents and Alaric gathered in a meeting room on the university campus to meet with a consultation of doctors. “Do you know why you are here? - asked the leading neurologist Lee. He replied: “This was all organized by my wife.”

“Do you know that you are sick?”

“My head often hurts,” he said. “And I also had heart surgery.”

Neurologists delivered a verdict. He had a classic case of frontotemporal dementia ( LVD) - more precisely, the behavioral variant of this disease. It affects the network of brain regions that are sometimes described as the basis of personality. With the progression of a pathological disease, it made Lee a completely different person.

An LVD is a whole accumulation of neurodegenerative diseases that affect a person’s behavior or speech, but do not affect, for the most part, his memory - at least in the early stages. Unlike Alzheimer's disease, LHD is much less known. This is a rare disease that affects one out of 5,000 people, although many neurologists studying it believe that this diagnosis is made less often than it would be worth it. In people under the age of 60, this is known to be the most common form of dementia. However, since Lee was a little over thirty, this case was unusual. For some patients, genetic mutations are likely to be the cause of the disease, and in some of them family members have been exposed to neurodegenerative diseases. However, in their studies, neurologists could not find a single cause of the disease in Lee.

But regardless of its causes, the forecast is disappointing. There is no cure. Doctors warned that the symptoms would only progress, and over time, he would most likely stop talking, move, swallow hard, and then some kind of infection or injury would be fatal. The best that doctors could offer was a balanced diet and exercise.

The family was struck by the words of neurologists. We couldn’t argue with brain images. On a wall-mounted screen, doctors showed them a sectional view of four temporal lobes of Lee's brain. In a healthy brain, the convolutions familiar to all come out in pictures white or gray, and go to the very edges of the skull, filling the entire space. Lee's brain looked completely different.

Its frontal lobes were full of black dips - in these areas brain tissue died. Christine gasped when she saw this. “There were huge black dots in his brain,” says Alaric. “And that confirmed the diagnosis.”

Lee accepted his death sentence with complete calm. His family was crying, and he praised the beautiful engagement ring of one of the doctors. At that moment, Alaric looked at his brother and for the first time understood the whole depth of his changes.


Lee is still involved in some business with his wife and children, including assembling puzzles.

Few diseases destroy a personality so much as a behavioral variant of IED. This disease tears into small pieces everything that determines a person’s personality - hobbies, interests, desire to communicate, everyday habits. Over time, the disease turns a person into someone unfamiliar, into a person with the same memories, but with an alarming set of new habits. Then it devastates a person, takes away mobility, language and memories from him.

Since LWD is relatively little known and may resemble Alzheimer's or mental illness, it is difficult to diagnose. In the case of Lee, the early stages can be confused with something no more serious than a midlife crisis. Patients can travel for years to regular and family psychologists, staff departments and doctors. By the time patients find out about their illness, they are often already unable to recognize the seriousness of their situation.

Symptoms may vary depending on which part of the brain the disease infects. Some people strike religion, dramatically change their political preferences or interests, or clothing styles. One stockbroker, for example, began wearing exclusively lavender-colored clothes and suddenly went in cycles in drawing. With the development of the disease, he engaged in petty theft and began to swim naked in public pools.

Loss of shame often occurs in patients with LHD, which is why their behavior could terrify themselves before they become ill. They can urinate in the presence of other people, steal things in stores, drive on red, molest people with sexual intentions, rummage in the trash in search of food - and all this can be a symptom of the disease. Patients may lose their ability to assess the social situation, which makes it difficult to interact with them. In one extreme case, the patient’s wife nearly cut off her finger with a garden pruner taken from her neighbors and screamed out to her husband, who had an LVD, that she urgently needed to go to the hospital. He replied that first you need to return the pruner to neighbors.

This behavior occurs because neurons die in the frontal and temporal lobes, two large parts of the brain. A particularly vulnerable part of these sites is the so-called a salient network, which is responsible for filtering sensations, memories and emotions and focusing a person on the most important activity at the moment. When it breaks, people may not cope with assessing the emotional impact of their actions on others. “Emotions are at the heart of most of the choices we make in life, so if you don’t have such systems, you will already be a different person,” says Virginia Sturm, a neurophysiologist at the University of California, San Francisco. “You no longer have clear anchors that tie you to your personality, and the boundaries of the personality are blurred.”

As a result, many patients with LHD become as lethargic as Lee, and their personality fire goes out to the state of smoldering embers. Apathy leads to intemperance, as patients lose the desire to take care of themselves.

A few months after being diagnosed, Christine spent all her free time with her husband. His fading did not slow down, and she realized that he would only move away even more. They spent the summer of 2017 for long joint walks. They traveled with the whole family. She noticed that she carefully scrutinized every conversation: was this his last joke? Last laugh? Last hug? She couldn’t know that. He began to leave the apartment without warning, and she had to grab the child and run after him along the busy streets of San Francisco.

Lee quickly became uncontrollable. When the child learned to crawl, Christine put a gate at the top of the stairs so that he would not fall from above. However, each time passing by, Lee unlocked it. He began to watch music videos at maximum volume in the living room at 11 pm, while his young child was sleeping in the next room. Sometimes he did not sleep all night and walked in circles. Christine struggled to take care of her son, while ensuring that Lee did not go unnoticed out the door.

He and Lee's parents were increasingly worried that he would be lost, or robbed, or he would leave on the roadway. His parents, who were already over 60, volunteered to take care of him, and in the fall of 2017, Kristin agreed that it was time for him to move to them in San Jose, while they were developing a long-term plan. “It was very difficult to protect him in San Francisco,” says his father, Randon Holloway. “He definitely needed a walk.” Christine worked full time in San Francisco, and Lee visited them with her son several times a month.

Christine and her son spent a lot of time on weekends in San Jose. In the first year, as Lee's mother recalls, Katie Holloway, when Lee saw the couple coming, "he always ran to the bedroom and grabbed his suitcase." He said, "I want to go back to San Francisco."

Often Lee tried to leave the house. As a result, his parents set a signal that loudly announced the door was open. They hid his shoes. He looked for shoes, and if he found, he laced up and ran out into the street.

In his spare time from trying to escape, Lee devised various activities for himself: to look at family photos on the phone, play Mario Kart, watch YouTube videos - and these outbursts alternated with about a 30-second period. He could search on YouTube for “Cloudflare”, “Christine Holloway” or the name of his favorite band and watch clips of the clips. Then he walked around the house, and his heavy steps could be heard at any time of the day. To soften this sound, Katie laid rubber mats on the floor.

Months passed, and he spoke less and less. In a video shot in July 2018, Lee hugs his son and reads him a bedtime story. Lee's speech gets confused, there is no audible intonation in it, and he seeks to quickly flip through cardboard pages.

Taking off all this, Christine understood that this might be the last bedtime story that he would read to their son. And she continued to record the video, and in the end she told them both: “Great job!”

Soon it became impossible to talk to him. Lee began to mutter endless repeating chunks of text. He told Christine: “We met at Cloudflare. We got engaged in Rome. We got married in Maui, Hawaii. ” And he repeated it hundreds of times a day. Therefore, these fragments began to be shortened and became less and less legible. He spoke less frequently in sentences, and instead muttered sequences of numbers or letters.

In September 2018, Prince and Zatlin visited him while he was visiting San Francisco. When they saw him for the first time in many months, they decided that he looked like a zombie wandering aimlessly from room to room with empty eyes. Sometimes during their visit, he would sit in the living room, turn on the TV, switch channels, without stopping for a single more than a minute. Then he left again, and all this time he repeated in a whisper the numbers:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7.

He was simultaneously aware and not aware of what was happening, which greatly worried his family. When I arrived at his parents' house in August 2019, Alaric and Christine were there. We crowded in the corridor, and his mother slipped into the kitchen to make tea. He stood tall and silent, with his arms hanging down at his sides. He looked at Christine without expression when she introduced me and explained that I had come to write a story about his life. He turned and went into the living room, and then into the kitchen, where he leaned his elbows on the countertop and without a word extended his mother's hand, demanding a bite. Then Kristin and Alaric went for a walk with him while I was talking with his parents.

We were sitting in the living room, and Katie described how she had to look after her son, while he was increasingly moving away from them. She lacks the warmth of their daily communication. “He used to come up to hug me and say, 'I love you, mom,'” she says. “But he no longer does that.”

Katie is not the only one who hardly accepts Lee as he has become. Caring for him has become a burden for the family, and his relatives sometimes argue about who should take care of him and where he should live. Christine spent a lot of time with a psychologist, trying to cope with grief and guilt over the decision to live separately from Lee. She says that for years she felt lonely in their relationship, and she intends to provide the child with a relatively normal childhood. Alexandra, Lee's first wife, is thinking about whether their marriage fell apart due to illness, or because of incompatibility. Was he just that kind of person who could oversleep the European holidays and refuse home-made food, or were these the first symptoms?

It’s impossible to find out exactly. Who was he then? Who is he now? How strong is a person regarding the test of time? Philosopher Derek Parfit could approach this problem with the question of how many psychological chains link today's Lee to the past Lee. They are weaker than most people. But do not disappear.

In January 2019, Christine's phone rang when she taxied through the grocery store parking lot. She glanced at the screen and froze. Lee called. On the screen was his face, an old photo from the time when they just started dating. She had not seen this photograph for almost two years - he had not called her for so long.

She answered, and spoke quickly. “Baby, I love you very much, I miss you,” she cried. - Are you okay? Do you need something?" He did not answer, but she heard his breath in the receiver.

Then he hung up.

At that moment, she realized how much she missed his voice. “I gradually lost it, and then he suddenly tried to get to me from somewhere where he is now,” she says. “It just hit me.”

The September Cloudflare listing brought the company $ 525 million. Lee, as one of the founders, suddenly became much richer. Now that Christine's financial future has been secured, she has put in place a long-term plan to care for Lee. She bought a house of 460 square meters. m on an area of ​​40 acres on the central coast of California, in such a place that his father, Randon, could walk with him along the coast. Together with the landscape designer, she worked out the site so that Lee could walk there. They laid wavy paths along which he could walk, and set up a mesh fence so that he was safe. Only non-toxic plants grow there. No walnut or fruit trees — he may choke when he has trouble swallowing, which his doctors fear.

Lee and his parents moved into this house, and nurses are now watching over him. Kristin moved some pieces of furniture purchased with him to the house to make this house seem more familiar to him, and covered one wall with family photographs. Sometimes she is visited by Alexander, his sons.

Kristin hopes to have developed the perfect environment for him. Most patients with LHD are not so lucky (if you can call it luck) - live out your life in a manor adapted to their needs, with a staff that tries to provide him with peace and security. But all the money in the world will not be able to answer the question of who actually lives in that house.

Sometimes Lee surprises her parents by gently patting them on the back. Sometimes he calls different people, although he does not say a word. Recently, his long-time colleague saw Lee like his LinkedIn post. On the broken roads of his consciousness, some remnants of his personality still remain.

A few months ago, Lee sent Christine several text messages. There were photos that she used to send him: she and their son for Halloween, a trip to the park, Christmas. At the end, he attributed the word "love."

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