By Jason Karlawish
Bill Lyon, the romantic, finally found his sunset.
It was the fall of 2017 when I went out to visit Bill at his home, not as “the man in the white coat,” as I’d been dubbed in his columns, but as an interviewer looking to understand what made him so fearless.
Fearless, not just to accept the Alzheimer’s diagnosis I had given him four years earlier, but to shout it out from the tallest tower he could scale.
Fearless, not just to live with the loss of his cognitive abilities, but to put them on display to a world that had so treasured his mind for decades.
Fearless, to celebrate the circle of life and acknowledge his place in it.
“You pass along the baton, and you hope you’re leaving behind you somebody who can pick up and follow,” he told me that day.