As I write these final words in January 2013, we are between visits. Maggie and Nancy Worthen have just left New York, and Dustin Manwiller is to come soon. Dustin was last in New York in 2008 and our team is eager to see him in person again. We are now seeing up to a couple of patients a month, and it has become almost like having house guests as patients and families come and go.

And for us the most amazing thing is how things seem to change with time, a passage that we still cannot readily predict, though we try. This chronicle is but a chapter in lives that will continue to evolve even as this narrative ends. That is how it should be because one of the messages I have sought to convey is that the injured brain is not static but a dynamic entity, whose biology if properly understood and harnessed has recuperative powers we might only imagine. So as I conclude, let me provide an update on the lives of some of the courageous patients and families you have come to know.

The Futurist

Let me start where so much of this story began, in Arkansas, and with Terry Wallis. I last spoke to Angilee in October 2012 when a news reporter wanted to interview the family. She turned them down, but shared with me how Terry was doing. With a mother's joy, she told me, “He's learned so much,” though she admitted, “he still has bad memory problems.”

Although he is “more aware of time now,” “he still thinks he's a teenager” even though he is forty-nine. But now, when his parents ask him what year it is, he won't answer. Not just because he does not know it but because “he refuses to accept it,” thinking he can “not be that old.”