My dad liked to say he wanted to take magic mushrooms on his deathbed.
It was mostly a joke but not entirely because he’d studied the science showing that tripping on psilocybin can help terminally ill people accept death and shed some of the depression and anxiety it rightfully causes.
I never asked my dad, who died at 99 and was the founder of the Telluride Mushroom Festival, what he meant by “deathbed.”
Did he want shrooms at the moment of death, or during the days leading up to his death? Or in the waning weeks? The decrescent months?
It’s not practical to time your moment of death with a mushroom trip, because who knows when you’re going to die?
Even if you’re terribly sick and close to death, it’s hard to target a four-hour window for a mushroom trip — unless you’re terminally ill and you take advantage of Colorado’s awesome law that allows terminally ill people kill themselves with medical approval.
But I don’t think you’d get much out of eating mushrooms at the moment of death anyway. Slipping away on morphine sounds much better and more comfortable.
Tripping as you die could be unbelievably terrifying, if you had any consciousness left. And if you didn’t, what would be the point? Some sort of unknown last-gasp mental stimulation? That sounds risky and pointless.
But the science showing that mushrooms help people be more comfortable with their unavoidable death makes sense. It’s in line with what doing psychedelics can teach you, how to lead your finite life in the most meaningful way — even if you’re facing a terminal illness like psychedelics researcher Dr. Roland Griffiths is.
Death on My Shoulder
Raised in a safe suburb of Denver, I didn’t think much a lot about death until I started taking psychedelics as a teenager. I was fortunate to have people around me, like my dad, who taught me to use mushrooms with respect – in a comfortable physical and mental space – when you could not only have fun but use them to gain some perspective on your own life and beyond.
If you do psychedelic drugs this way, you inevitably confront the ephemeral nature of life and the coming of death. They tell you not to wait, to get the most out of life while you have it, and to prioritize what matters: your people, your community, compassion, positiveness, warmth, texture, light, color, or whatever is meaningful to you.
Living with this psychedelic perspective — with an awareness of death — is a repeated theme in writings about mind-altering drugs.
Aldous Huxley returned to it repeatedly, and I especially like the mynah birds he presents in his novel “Island.” The islanders taught mynah birds to fly around and say, “Attention.” Pay attention to life now because it’s going so fast. Be here now. Focus on what matters.
I try to hold on to this idea in my life in different ways, one of which is to celebrate some of my birthday parties in cemeteries to eliminate any chance of denying that I’m getting closer to death. This year, it was next to my dad’s gravestone.
Spiritual Connection Via Shrooms?
It hasn’t been my experience yet, but lots of people eat mushrooms and find the spiritual assurance that the force of life extends beyond the human body into something that’s eternal. What could be more comforting than the faith that life continues in some way through some transcendent power?
What mushrooms have not helped me deal with is dementia, cancer, blindness, strokes, diabetes, deafness, numbness, isolation, emergency rooms, the general brutality and cruelty of aging — before you hit death. Things falling apart.
I’ve been watching my 94-year-old mom slowly decline mentally and physically. I see her most days, and she’ll tell you she is doing “okay.” What she is … is tough. Tougher than I am.
The mynah bird on your shoulder doesn’t have an answer for how to deal with this. Paying attention can send you to the gym, open your eyes, appreciate light and warmth, help you be compassionate.
But the falling apart is still unrelenting, and who wants to pay attention to it? I mean, yes, “Be here, now,” but maybe not for that, there, and then.
While mushrooms may help with acceptance and offer the advice of riding through aging together with people you care about, they don’t have the answer for the slow-dying part of death. But who does?
Aside from fighting for more expansive rights for self-euthanasia, it’s hard to know what to do.
It’s true, what they say, that with physical decline can come mental expansiveness and sensitivity, maybe even enhanced by your own pain and the pain around us. And there’s the chance – via aging – to change our perception of the world for the better, as articulated by David Byrne in Theater of the Mind.
But still.
As things corporeal turn south, the answer might be to pick a day and call it quits, like Maude does in the 1971 classic movie “Harold and Maude.” Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel makes a good case to end it at 75 years.
But here I am at 60. There are plenty of horrors out there from Ukraine to Venezuela but I have nothing serious to complain about, beyond middle-aged maladies. My pantry is full, and it even includes mushrooms, of both gourmet and magic varieties.
And thankfully, while we sort out how to deal with eventual demise, we can tip our hats to Colorado’s Natural Medicine Health Act and Pay Attention! — by doing mushrooms every now and then.
But don’t do them on your deathbed. Or expect them to help much as you descend toward it.
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