The Boy Who Came Back: The Near-Death, and Changed Life, of My Son Max

Archie Bland’s heartfelt essay recounts the moment his infant son, Max, stopped breathing and was resuscitated—possibly interrupted SIDS—and the years spent coming to terms with his resulting disability. Bland is not shy in recounting his frustration and rage, making this a very real portrayal of life after a shattering event. But we also discover the important lessons a loved one’s disability can teach us about ourselves.

I’ve thought a lot about why I’m writing this. I know that I’m repelled by the kind of spiritual vultures who might scour Max’s story for shareable aphorisms, and that ideally, I’d like to slap them with an injunction. On the other hand, I also know that what happened has changed me utterly, and confronted me with things about the world that I had never even tried to understand: how unbelievably precarious it all is, the breadth of what constitutes a meaningful life, and the medieval state of anxiety that the disabled world still produces in the typical one. I hate the way that disabled lives recede out of view because other people are too squeamish to talk about them, and I want to confront that tendency. Mostly, though, I think Max is already a thousand times more interesting than anyone I’ve ever met, and I want to tell you about him.