Introduction: When Loss Reveals What Life Is Sitting in my apartment, surrounded by the quiet hum of another year gone by, gratitude arrives unbidden. Not the forced kind, rehearsed for social media or New Year's resolutions, but something quieter—rooted in what my late mother made possible. Peace be with her. Last year she left was eventful, though that word feels too small, too tidy for what actually happened. Her passing turned my life upside down. Not in the cinematic way

I. Introduction: The Silence After the Noise The year began with a promise—a loud, confident assertion that we were finally closing in. The scanners were higher resolution; the datasets were massive; the adversarial teams were assembled like armies on a border. 2025 was supposed to be the year we finally pinned the butterfly to the board, labeled its parts, and explained exactly how the meat of the brain spins itself into the magic of the mind. We wanted a coronation. We got

Introduction: A Seizure That Feels Like God He used to call it the beautiful warning. Minutes, sometimes only seconds, before the storm took him, a wave would rise from somewhere behind the eyes, warm, luminous, unstoppable. The room would soften at its edges, colors deepening into something almost audible. Time loosened its grip. And then, unmistakably, the ecstatic aura would bloom, an inner sunrise that made ordinary perception feel like a half-remembered dream. “It’s the