The Most Beautiful Thing I Can Think Of

Psychedelics helped me prepare for my mother's death.

I’ve taken a fair amount of psychedelics over the last couple of decades. I’ve mostly enjoyed watching reality glimmer and melt, revealing things that my un-psychedelic eyes cannot see while my brain traces new neural pathways down the well-worn ski slopes of my psyche. Sometimes I’ve simply wanted to dance myself clean in the dark hours heading into a new year, or lie on my back in the woods and watch the trees breathe. Sometimes I’ve been trying to heal a particular wound. Psychedelics have always connected me to things that are bigger than I am, which is incredibly therapeutic, even if I’ve had a difficult experience now and then.

I took ketamine through a tele-health protocol a while back. I’d never enjoyed the drug when I’d tried it in social situations — disassociation isn’t my thing — so I was skeptical that I’d find it helpful therapeutically. But my therapist, who’d done a lot of work with me on my PTSD, encouraged me to try it.

The first session was profound. I re-entered this plane of existence with a sense of peace and calm that I hadn’t felt in as long as I could remember. I understood that I didn’t have to watch the scary movie on replay in my head all the time; I sobbed because I felt safe in my body. That hour-long journey opened a doorway to things I’d been seeking for the better part of two decades.

In the next session, for the first time ever, I experienced a full-body melt. I had zero physical form, I was just breath, and then, for some amazing amount of time, I was simply consciousness. Maybe it would have been frightening, if I hadn’t tripped a bunch before that, but it was indescribably freeing. As I came back to my body, I saw a series of cables connecting to my center coming down from the vastness above, with lights pulsing along them, into me. It was sci-fi weirdness, straight out of Star Trek, and it made absolute sense: this was the energy of everything and everyone that had come before me, and I was connected to all of it.

Hearing about other people’s drug trips is one of the most boring things ever, so I hope you’ll forgive me for writing about this. I swear I’m not gonna start telling you all about my dreams or anything. But I’ve been thinking about that feeling of being connected to bigger things in the wake of my mother’s death last week. My mother’s passing means that I’m the last of my immediate family left. We were four; now I am one. It’s weird. It’s really fucking weird.

My Dad, me, my Mum, my sister Caroline.

But I was with my mother a couple of nights before she died, and this really cool thing happened. She was in a bed in a palliative care facility, with a window facing west over the treetops full of fall colors. The sun was setting in a slow blaze of rose and gold against blue-gray clouds. My mother had been drifting in and out of consciousness for days, so I was just sitting with her, looking out the window at the colors and light, when she started speaking to people I couldn’t see. She said she’d walked a very long time to get here, and that she hadn’t known where she was going, but now that she was here, she was so glad to see everyone. She told someone that it was an honor to meet them. She kept raising her hand in greeting, moving it to clasp other hands. She said to them, This is my daughter Mary Jane. Her sister Caroline died, which was the greatest grief of my life. And then she said to me, Jane, these are your relatives.

The sunset from my mother’s room.

The room was darkening. I asked her who was there. She didn’t tell me, but she raised her hand again to them, and she sang a lullaby that she’d sung to me when I was a child. She was being welcomed.

She died two days later. I woke up to my room filled with an intense golden glow from the sunrise. So beautiful, I thought, and drifted back to sleep after a few minutes. When I woke up an hour later, I found out she had died as the sun rose.

I’ve had things happen around death. I feel like I’ve heard from my sister since she left. There are little signs, all the time, that remind me of my father and Caroline, and my friend Nicole — I don’t know they’re in charge of sending them or not (as scientists, my dad and sister definitely didn’t think they’d be in touch!) but I welcome them as reminders of the great love we shared, and also, that I have still have things to do while I’m here.

Sitting with my mother while she greeted her ancestors was profound; it’s helping me let go of some of my grief. I’ve sat with death more than once, and I now believe there’s more after we die. I really do, because of what I’ve seen.

Psychedelics can be an amazing tool to get a glimpse into that other dimension. They also help me remember that human unkindness is fleeting, comparatively speaking. The anxiety I have around next week’s election is overwhelming, but the GOP is operating from a place that has no connection to love, compassion, or family. Their desire for control will be trumped by community, even if that looks like every woman moving to the woods. We’ll live as witches in communes until conservatives get their heads out of their asses and stop killing us with abortion bans. We’ll drink mushroom tea and grow cannabis while we wait them out.

And I’ll most likely be in a forest or desert saying hello to my ancestors with the help of some psilocybin in the next month or so. 💚 MJ xo