The Day Before

My first son died one day before his due date.

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. A diagnosis that explains nothing. “Sudden” means “we don’t know why.” “Syndrome” means “we named it so we’d have something to put on the paperwork.” Medicine is good at naming things it doesn’t understand. That’s how it saves face.

I’m not going to describe the details. They don’t belong in this book. Or—they do, but not the way you think.

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Here’s what in this story bears directly on the rest of the book’s chapters.

In the previous chapter I wrote about form being more fundamental than substrate. That identity works as a pattern, with the body as its replaceable carrier. That a caterpillar dissolves into soup — and from the soup a butterfly assembles — and memory persists. That the imaginal discs — the blueprint for the future form — wait inside the caterpillar from the very start, dormant, until the time comes.

A beautiful, elegant, encouraging theory, — and now for its other side, the one the theory itself tries to pass over in silence.

Sometimes the imaginal discs—don’t wake up. Sometimes the form—doesn’t assemble. Sometimes the blueprint is there, the substrate is there, the hormonal signal is there, and—nothing happens. Or—the wrong thing happens. Or—it stops halfway.

One day before.

Nine months of morphogenesis. Nine months during which, from a single cell, following a blueprint stored in something deeper than DNA (Levin), a human being assembles. Hands, feet, heart, brain. Eyes that haven’t yet seen light. Lungs that haven’t yet taken a single breath. Everything—in place. Everything—ready.

And—one day before—stop.