Death
If you ask my son what happens after you die, he’ll tell you confidently that you’re sucked up into a portal in the sky and then you come back down to earth as a baby.
In the fall of 2019, we had to put down our beloved dog, Gus.
Zack and I were bereft though we had known it was coming. Gus had been lethargic and we’d taken him to the vet. On Zack's fortieth birthday we learned that Gus had terminal cancer. He was only nine years old. We rescued him as an 8 week old puppy and he was our first baby.
The only treatment for his cancer would be costly, painful and only extend his life by a matter of months. We decided it would be best to let him live out his final days without multiple vet visits, and he was buoyant and cheerful, playful and happy until the very end. The vet told us, “You’ll know when it’s time,” which made me anxious. I didn’t want to put him down before he was ready, and I certainly didn’t want to wait too long and have him be in pain. “You’ll know,” the vet said.
She was right. One morning, a couple months after his diagnosis, Gus spotted a squirrel outside and took off after it as was his custom. Halfway across the yard he collapsed and couldn't get back to his feet. He was in considerable pain. He refused to move. The previous day he’d been fetching tennis balls happily. Now he looked at us with woeful eyes. He knew. And so did we. We brought him in, and the vet confirmed, “Yes, today’s the day.”
We asked what we should do about our children. Should they be with us when we said goodbye? T was a baby so we left him at home, but G was four and extremely close to Gus. The vet said it would not be scary, it would be peaceful, and in her experience, it was better for kids to be there so they didn’t make up a story about what had happened. We brought G with us. We gathered around Gus and told him how much we loved him, we cradled and pet him and cried and said goodbye. They administered the shot, and he went to sleep in our arms. Eventually, he stopped breathing, and in a moment he was gone.
That’s how our daughter learned about death.
I am glad G was with us when we said goodbye to Gus, and I’m grateful for the conversations it enabled us to have, but only time will tell if she'll agree that it was a good choice. My daughter is an anxious child and death has been front of mind for her ever since.
I remember my own childhood anxiety about death. Death was permanent, the ultimate FOMO. Death was being forced to go upstairs and sleep in the dark for eternity while everyone else was downstairs at the party. Death was nothingness which was incomprehensible and terrifying. I couldn’t quite grasp the concept of consciousness (and certainly couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have none), and so I ruminated and fretted and developed rituals to stave off the inevitable. My daughter, I’m sad to report, did not fall far from the me.
I was a Fundamentalist Atheist until about two and a half years ago. Now I’m a kind of pagan agnostic, a believer in the beauty of trees and an admirer of the weirdness of jellyfish. My brain refuses all manner of Sky Daddies, but I’m now far more willing to admit that I do not know everything. What happens after we die? What the fuck do I know? I’m not buying a pearly gate situation, I’m not expecting an angel to read off a pros and cons list of my good deeds or shitty behavior to determine which door I get to enter. At the same time, I’m not gonna rule out the possibility that there is something I don’t know about, for instance, what happens when our consciousness leaves our body.
When confronted by my four year old with the question, “What happens after we die?” I had a couple of options. First, I could lie. People have been doing it for thousands of years. Second, I could bum her all the way out. That’s the option my dad went with. I chose a third option. I said something like, “Nobody knows for sure. But there are lots of different ideas. Some people believe we go to a place called Heaven. Some people believe that our souls are reincarnated. For example, maybe when you die, your soul comes back in your next life as a dog. Some people believe that your body becomes part of the earth and your consciousness becomes a part of everything.” I listed off a few more options and felt pretty good about myself for being such an excellent purveyor of wisdom.
A few nights later, my daughter sobbed to me at bedtime, “I don’t want to be a dog!” It took a few minutes to understand that the only thing she absorbed from our conversation was that when you die you become a dog.
Death is a major topic in my household. Perhaps brought about by the recent solar eclipse, my kids have a new obsession with the sun burning out and the world ending. Recently, I overheard a conversation between my children and my husband that went something like this:
G (9 year old): Daddy, is the world gonna end? Is the sun gonna explode and swallow up the earth?
Z: Not for billions of years.
T (5 year old): Don’t worry! We’re gonna be dead for SOOOOOOO LONG when the world ends. For like a hundred years!
Z: Way more than a hundred years.
T: We’ll be dead for soooooo long! You don’t have to be scared G! We’ll be dead for so long, right Daddy? So long!
Z: By the time the world ends, human beings will have evolved into something completely different.
Me (never wanting to be left out): We might not even live on Earth anymore! Maybe humans or whatever we become will already be living on a completely different planet.
T: I wish I could live on Jupiter.
G: If the sun explodes, and the world ends, so does Jupiter.
T: Oh. Okay. I still think it would be fun to live on Jupiter.
This morning, my daughter came downstairs and reported to me, “The sun looks really close today, is the world gonna end?” Bless her sweet little anxious heart, this poor kid got every faulty gene I had to offer. Meanwhile, her brother is psyched that he’s gonna be dead for billions of years before the sun explodes.
If you ask my son what happens after you die, he’ll tell you confidently that you’re sucked up into a portal in the sky and then you come back down to earth as a baby. Okay! Who am I to say that’s not what happens? Wherever he got that from, it’s comforting to him. I’ve never confirmed or argued against it. Instead I nod and say: “Hmm. That’s an interesting idea.”
In The Library of Esoterica Tarot, Jessica Hundley writes:
“With endings come new beginnings. The Death card brings with it transformation, radical elimination, and rebirth. The past is behind us, the future ahead. Death asks us for total cleansing, for abandoning the old in favor of the new. He breaks habit and reconstructs new pathways in the mind. He asks that one let go and move on, close one door and open another. He is the purge, cleansing us from within. He signifies profound metamorphosis and transmutation. He is the shedding of skin, purification through destruction. He demands transition, change, and renewal. He destroys in order to rebuild.”
In Tarot, the Death card is about internal transformation. It’s almost never about literal death, rather metaphorical death and rebirth. The Major Arcana tells a story and Death is only the halfway point. There is still so much more to come! Think of HOW MANY MORE NEWSLETTERS I HAVE LEFT TO WRITE!
Even though Death isn’t really about literal death, it’s worth contemplating mortality regularly. Leaning in to what scares us strips fear of its power. I find great comfort in the fact that the Death card is only number 13 in a story told with 21 cards. Because endings are good, actually. Dreams die, relationships end, hearts break. Often times, it clears the way for something better.
Forgive me for being a person who didn’t do mushrooms until they were a middle-aged non-drinker. I’ll try not to be the guy at the party in a poncho yammering on about fractals and sacred geometry. But if you’ll permit me, I’d like to invite you into this corner for just a moment to tell you something I learned on mushrooms. I’ll make it quick.
The first time I did mushrooms, I felt a profound sense of peace and understanding about my place in the universe. Some inner fist in my chest unclenched around whatever grip it was holding on mortality. Some inner wisdom whispered, “It’s okay, girl, I got you.” I cried about pinecones, I rolled in the dirt, I got lost in the woods, I peed under a gigantic tree, I examined my relationship to shame, and for the first time in my entire life I thought, “Some day I’m going to die, and that’s okay. Everything that lives dies. It’s okay, girl, I got you.”
You have to understand how incredibly foreign that idea is to a girl from Connecticut who’s always thought that the best way to process a fear of death is to guzzle gin and tonics and stuff your fears into a tiny box in your brain that you never ever open. One mushroom trip and my entire understanding of the universe shifted. Mushrooms are powerful medicine and it’s crazy that they’re not legal and widely available. Mushrooms should only be illegal for Tom Schwartz and Tom Sandoval from Vanderpump Rules (for some people mushrooms alleviate a fear of death, for Schwartz and Sandoval, mushrooms bestow tacky interior design ideas).
Like any new convert, after my mushroom experience, I read A LOT of literature and talked ad nauseam to anyone who would listen about the life-changing magic of psychedelics. I half-jokingly (but not really) told everyone that the way to save the planet would be to covertly dose every single government official and then bring them out to the middle of the forest so the trees could give them a good talking to about climate change. I’ve calmed down considerably since then, but I’m not that embarrassed. It’s a rite of passage to become obsessed with psychedelics for a brief period of time in your life. If you haven’t yet, congratulations, you’ve got something to look forward to.
Here’s the thing about mushrooms. They are not only a metaphor for death and rebirth, but they literally feast on decomposition. Mushrooms are saprophytic organisms, the composters of the natural world, nourished by decay. They consume death, and through that process create new opportunities for life. There are all kinds of incredible uses for mushrooms — scientists have used mushrooms to break down toxic materials and nuclear waste for example. Mushrooms create interconnected super highways called mycelium beneath the earth. Trees tap into the mycelial network, and essentially use it to communicate. I know! So M. Night Shyamalan’s horror (comedy) The Happening, about the trees getting so pissed off at human beings about climate change that they start emitting a chemical that makes us all commit suicide, was on to something! (I’m kidding, I’ve spoken to trees, and they’re peaceful)
Please watch this. You'll be happy you did.
The mycelial network has been described as a kind of natural internet — the “wood wide web” as some Deadhead Boomer mushroom enthusiasts have called it.
Mushrooms gather nutrients from decay, rot, and death, and they build intricate systems of communication that connect disparate organisms to create living forests. It’s fucking radical, man! And what’s even crazier (to me), is that when you consume a psychedelic mushroom, it’s almost like you’re tapping into that network as well (again, as long as you’re not Schwartz and Sandoval). The way I described it after my first trip was that I could suddenly understand the language of trees. And, before you start making fun of me, no I didn’t necessarily hallucinate that I was actually talking to trees (although that would be rad and I’m down), but in some intuitive place, I suddenly understood something I hadn’t before.
I think human beings are terrified of death because we process the world as individuals. Modern life only separates us more from one another. That’s why death feels like the ultimate FOMO, because we see our lives as separate from everyone else’s. Well, I’m here to tell you that the trees beg to differ. After ingesting a psychedelic mushroom, my experience was of profound connectedness to every living thing. When people talk about using mushrooms to treat mental illnesses, they’ll sometimes call this phenomenon “ego death.” There is psychic relief in the release of your individuality in favor of connection to the living world. It’s that connection that gives me comfort, that makes death far less terrifying. How can you miss out on something if you’re a part of everything?
Are you guys still with me? Have I convinced you to dose American government officials with psilocybin to save the world yet? Don’t worry, you’ll get there.
My friend, Emma, is my favorite Tik Tok curator. As she puts it, “My algorithm knows me better than my husband does.” My algorithm does not understand me at all. I don’t know who it thinks I am, but I’m not that girl. I don’t want to see, for example, people popping ever-larger zits, but for some reason that’s what my algorithm is desperate for me to see. Anyway, Emma recently posted this video:
"If you can't get out of it, get into it"
This is my new philosophy about death, and why I’m leaning into the conversations my children are having with me about their fear of it. “If you can’t get out of it, get into it.” We’re all going to die. None of us has any certainty about what happens next. But Death is one more transformation, one more opportunity to evolve. So, even if we don’t fly into a portal and become a baby again, even if we don’t come back to life as a dog, even if there is no Heaven or Hell…. even if it turns out that all that happens is that our individual consciousness ceases to exist, and the worms and mushrooms and the other organisms that feast on death turn our bodies into soil that allows new life to grow? Well, honestly, that’s pretty fucking cool too.
Recommendations!
Do mushrooms! But do it in a controlled environment with a person you trust.
How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan
This Is Your Mind On Plants by Michael Pollan
Entangled life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake
Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save The World by Paul Stamets
Fantastic Fungi a film by Louie Schwartzberg (you can watch this on Netflix, and you should!)