There is never a good time to receive a cancer diagnosis, but for Janeen, the timing was especially hard. Two years earlier, in 2003, she had undergone open-heart surgery. On the heels of surviving that trauma, learning that she had incurable leukemia was an even harsher blow. “Every huge challenge I’ve ever been faced with, you know, I’ve always come back.” But after the diagnosis, she continued, “I had moments when I just thought, ‘man, how many times can you just keep coming back?’ ” She felt disconnected, but she wasn’t sure from what. It was like “being in the wasteland.”
In 2008, Janeen found out about a study that was being conducted at Johns Hopkins University. The researchers were interested in whether a transcendent experience, occasioned by the drug psilocybin, would have therapeutic effects on individuals facing imminent death. Psilocybin, the active ingredient in so-called magic mushrooms, can facilitate mystical experiences and feelings of awe and rapture in users, and like many hallucinogens, it has a long history of religious use. “From the moment I read about the study,” Janeen said, “I knew, before I dialed the number, I knew that it was exactly what I needed to do.”
Since ancient times, mystics, seekers, and shamans all across the world have consumed hallucinogens as part of their rituals. Many indigenous peoples of North America consumed peyote and “divine mushrooms,” for example, and there’s reason to believe that hallucinogens were involved in the religious ceremonies of the Aryan peoples of modern India and Iran, and also in the Eleusinian mysteries of ancient Greece. These plants were highly sacred and revered, and they were thought to offer users a direct portal into a realm of spirits and gods. Those who consumed them broke into a transcendent world where they saw visions and heard voices that they interpreted as divine. The Aztecs called magic mushrooms teonanácatl, or “God’s flesh.”
Roland Griffiths, the principal investigator on the study, doesn’t ascribe any divine properties to the drug. But his personal twenty-year practice of meditation had made him curious about mysticism and how it fit into his secular worldview as a psychopharmacologist. Could a transcendent experience reduce the fear and anxiety that Janeen and others like her felt upon receiving a terminal diagnosis?
To find out, the researchers prepared each participant extensively. For each dose, they put the participant in a comfortable, private room and equipped him or her with an eye mask and a headset. The eye mask was meant to block visual disturbances from interfering with the inner experience. The headset played songs programmed by the researchers that corresponded to the peaks and valleys of the drug-induced experience of transcendence. Subjects had been told what they might feel after taking the drug, and during the sessions, two members of the study staff remained in the room with each volunteer to provide support if needed. All in all, the researchers did everything they could to ensure that the participants felt safe and secure—that they wouldn’t have a “bad trip.”
The process was so rigorous in part because Griffiths and his team wanted to avoid the fate of the charismatic psychologist and icon of the 1960s counterculture Timothy Leary. Leary, an academic psychologist at Harvard University, had heard of the use of “divine mushrooms” in Mexico. In the summer of 1960, he traveled to Mexico and tried them with some friends at a villa in Cuernavaca. At the time, Leary was on the cusp of a midlife crisis. Nearing forty, he complained, “I was a middle-aged man involved in the middle-aged process of dying. My joy in life, my sensual openness, my creativity were all sliding downhill.” But his transcendent experience—complete with psychedelic visions—zapped him back to life. “In four hours by the swimming pool in Cuernavaca,” he writes in his autobiography, “I learned more about the mind, the brain, and its structures than I did in the preceding fifteen [years] as a diligent psychologist.” The veil, he explained, had been drawn from his eyes, and he was a “changed man.”
By the time he returned to Harvard, Leary was convinced that hallucinogens were a force for good. He started the Harvard Psilocybin Project to determine “the conditions under which psilocybin can be used to broaden and deepen human experience”—and also began to publicly promote the use of psychedelics. But Leary’s enthusiasm for such drugs led to flaws in his research methodology. And once LSD became popular recreationally, there was a backlash against both Leary and the drugs. He was dismissed from Harvard in 1963, and hallucinogenic drugs were made illegal nationwide several years later. Richard Nixon called Leary “the most dangerous man in America.”
Over fifty years later, Griffiths and his research associates are cautiously paving the way forward on this kind of research with the approval of the federal government. Their studies have looked at the effects psilocybin can have on four groups of research participants: healthy volunteers, anxious or depressed cancer patients with a life-threatening diagnosis, people interested in quitting smoking, and religious professionals like clergymen. Their findings have again and again confirmed just how powerful transcendent experiences can be in building meaning—a fact that Janeen would soon learn.
After taking the capsule, Janeen remained in the session room for about eight hours, lying on a sofa and listening to the researchers’ soundtrack. During that time, she had a classic mystical experience. She felt time stop; she felt connected to something vast that lay beyond the realm of ordinary experience; feelings of awe flooded her. “There was not one atom of myself that did not merge with the divine,” she said of the experience. “You think about these things, you have some experiences that are transcendent, but then the big one comes along, and it’s like oh—my—fucking—god.”
The most dramatic moment came during Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings,” which played when Janeen was peaking. She was focused on how beautiful the piece was when she realized that her breath was following the melody. As the music came to its climax, the notes started getting higher and higher. When she reached the top of the ascent, she held her breath. “And then the song was over and, in that moment,” she said, “I realized it was ok not to breathe anymore. It was a strange revelation. Being aware that it was ok to stop breathing—that was huge for me.”
As was the case for many of the other cancer patients Griffiths has studied, Janeen’s anxiety dissolved. She was less afraid of death. “When you have that experience,” she said, “you lose your fear.” She went on: “It doesn’t mean that I wasn’t fearful when my kidney came out, or of how aggressive this cancer was. But I just had to remind myself of what I said: That when you get to the end, it’s ok not to breathe.”
“If you hold the strong materialistic worldview that everything ends with the body’s death, with no meaning or hope beyond that,” Griffiths explained, “then death seems like a pretty dismal prospect.” But, he added, if “you have an experience of transcendence, when one has a sense of the interconnectedness of all things and a stunning appreciation of life and consciousness, whether or not you come out believing in heaven or karma or an afterlife, you can recognize the depth of our ignorance in the astounding mystery of what it is to be alive and aware.” In Janeen’s case, that experience with mystery allowed her to make peace with the fact that she would die.
“I’m sitting on my back porch right now,” Janeen said in 2014, “watching my plants grow, and everything that my eyes fall upon, that’s the universe. You are the universe, you are part of the greater whole.” Realizing that she was a piece of something much larger was reassuring to her. It helped her reframe her death as just one step in a bigger cycle.
Buddhists, Janeen said, use the example of a cloud to illustrate this point. Does a cloud that disappears from the sky die? “Sooner or later,” writes the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, “the cloud will change into rain or snow or ice. If you look deeply into the rain, you can see the cloud. The cloud is not lost; it is transformed into rain, and the rain is transformed into grass and the grass into cows and then to milk and then into the ice cream you eat.” The cloud did not die. It was always in the universe in one way or another. In a similar way, the tr
anscendent experience helped Janeen see that she, too, would always be in the universe in one way or another—which is why, when the time came, it was okay for her to stop breathing. Janeen passed away in 2015.
“How often do you dream of her?” Sarah asked. “Is it, like, she comes to you and says, ‘It’s all going to be okay’?”
“Oh yeah. I’ve had dreams like that. But also more ordinary ones. Like once,” Christine said, “I dreamt that she was doing the dishes and I walked over to her and said, ‘Don’t worry about doing the dishes. I’ll take care of them.’ And that was it. Brief. But another time, I dreamt that I was sitting on a bench and she walked over and sat down next to me. She put her hand on my hand and said, ‘Everything is going to be okay.’ It was intense. I could feel her hand on my hand, physically.” Christine put one of her hands on the other.
“And then,” she continued, “I woke up and thought, ‘I’m never going to see my mother again.’ It just hits me every now and then. Like I’m walking down the street and something happens in my day and I think, ‘Oh, I should tell my mom about this.’ But then I remember I can’t. Because she’s dead.” Christine moved some of the food around on her plate with her fork. “She was just here. I could see her coming into the room. And now,” she said, shaking her head and looking down, “I won’t see her again.”
“I haven’t had a dream like that yet,” Sarah said, “about my dad.”
I was sitting at a small square dinner table in Sarah’s apartment in Washington Heights, in Upper Manhattan. There were five of us at the table—Sarah and her boyfriend Raúl, Christine, another young woman named Sandy, and me. By the time Sarah and Christine spoke about dreaming and not dreaming of their dead parents, it was about 8 p.m. on a crisp Sunday night in October. Christine, Sandy, and I had arrived two and a half hours earlier, bringing wine, chips and guacamole, and an apple pie. Sarah had made moussaka, and once we arrived, Raúl stirred up some cocktails; his infused tequilas sat on a side table in mason jars. The lights were dim. In the background, soft instrumental indie music was playing. Every now and then, one of the two cats in the apartment darted across the floor.
Welcome to The Dinner Party, a national community of young adults who have experienced the unexpected death of a close loved one. In cities all across the United States, dinner partiers like Sarah, Christine, Sandy, and Raúl get together regularly to break bread and talk about how their loss has affected their lives. Though this was my first time meeting the other four, they had all been gathering for a few weeks for dinner parties at Sarah and Raúl’s. I haven’t experienced a loss like theirs, but I was invited to join them, to see how people can come together to forge meaning and grow through suffering.
We all carry emotional baggage of some kind—baggage that can bring with it fear, hurt, guilt, and insecurity. For most of us, there is at least one specific source of pain that lives inside of us and colors the way we see the world. The memory of an alcoholic mother or an abusive father, the pain of being bullied at school, the horror of losing a child, the trauma of being raped, the helplessness of being held hostage by depression, cancer, addiction, or other ailments of the mind and body: these experiences of suffering can be tremendously difficult to overcome.
They also pose serious threats to finding meaning in life. They can shatter our fundamental assumptions about the world—that people are good, the world is just, and our environment is a safe and predictable place. They can breed cynicism and hatred. They can throw us into despair and even drive us to want to end our lives. They can lead us to have troubled relationships, to lose our sense of identity and purpose, to abandon our faith, to conclude that we don’t matter or that life is senseless—that it is all, as Shakespeare’s Macbeth says, “sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
But this is an incomplete picture of adversity. Traumatic experiences can leave deep, sometimes permanent, wounds. Yet struggling through them can also push us to grow in ways that ultimately make us wiser and our lives more fulfilling. We do so by relying on the pillars of belonging, purpose, storytelling, and transcendence. If those pillars are strong, we’ll be able to lean on them when adversity strikes. But if the pillars crumble or fall as a result of a shattering trauma, we can rebuild them to be even stronger and more resilient. This is what I saw Sarah, Christine, Sandy, and Raúl doing as we sat around the dinner table on that autumn evening in New York.
—
The Dinner Party started when two women, Lennon Flowers and Carla Fernandez, met in Los Angeles in 2010 and soon realized that they each had recently lost a parent. Carla’s father had died of brain cancer, and Lennon’s mother of lung cancer. Each woman was twenty-one at the time, and they formed an instant connection over their shared experience, especially because neither felt they could talk to their other friends about the loss. Their friends would get uncomfortable when the death came up. Not knowing how to respond, they would say they were sorry and then quickly change the subject. It wasn’t their fault—they didn’t know any better, as Lennon told me when we met in New York—but their reactions left her and Carla feeling alone. So it was a relief for each of them to have someone to rely on as they went through the ups and downs of grief.
Carla pulled together a list of a few other twentysomethings who had lost loved ones and invited them to a dinner party at her apartment. Five women showed up. They ended up talking until 2 a.m., as if they were best friends. Lennon and Carla realized that they had created a special community that evening, and they eventually started thinking about ways to spread that community across the country.
By 2016, what began as an informal dinner at Carla’s apartment had transformed into a national nonprofit organization and movement. Thanks to Carla and Lennon, bereaved young people are now gathering together at tables in more than sixty cities worldwide—from San Francisco and Washington, DC, to Vancouver and Amsterdam—for intimate dinners like the one I attended in Washington Heights. Lennon and Carla have also organized retreats for Dinner Party hosts like Sarah and have put on events in New York and San Francisco that explore how people cope with grief. But the organization’s focus is the dinner parties themselves. Each table hosts about six to ten people, and when it fills up, it’s not uncommon for a waiting list to develop or for another table to pop up in the same city.
At dinner, there’s no agenda or theme. The Dinner Partiers, as they call themselves, can talk about whatever they want, like relationship problems or the media’s beauty standards, as at the dinner I went to. But they eventually come around to the topic of the death of their loved ones. How do I live my life when the person I loved the most is dead? What am I supposed to do now that the person who always cheered me on and gave me advice is no longer here? How do I cope with the guilt of not treating them as well as they deserved when they were alive? Are they ashes-and-dust dead, or are they still watching over me? How do I make sense of this sudden and unexpected loss? These are some of the questions that come up again and again at the tables.
Christine’s mother passed away five years before the dinner party, when Christine was a junior studying engineering at the University of Michigan. Her mother had been walking home from work when a truck came barreling down the road and hit her as she crossed the street. She died instantly.
Christine and her mother were very close. They got together regularly to watch movies and make dinner. Before Christine’s mother died, a terrible car accident caused her to stop driving, so Christine reorganized her college schedule so that she could come over from Ann Arbor most days of the week and chauffeur her mother around. One reason that Christine decided to study engineering was so that she could find a good job when she graduated to support her mother.
Christine’s focus on school was so intense that she had no social life to speak of. Though her mother never pressured her academically, Christine would often sacrifice spending time with her mom to study: “There were times where I just couldn’t pull myself away from my school work, so I would call her and say,
‘Mom, I can’t. I have to work.’ And she would say, ‘Oh, that’s okay.’ She was so understanding.”
The night her mother died, Christine was on a date at an art museum, an uncharacteristic break from her studying schedule. She told her mother that she wouldn’t be able to pick her up as she usually did. It was not a problem, her mom said; she could take the bus home. Later that evening, Christine noticed her phone was ringing. It was her mom.
“I don’t like talking on the phone in museums,” Christine said. “So when I saw she was calling, I told myself I’d call her back.”
Christine didn’t check her phone again until the end of the night. “I saw ten missed calls and voicemails from numbers I didn’t recognize,” she said. “That’s never good. I called back and someone at the hospital said, ‘Your mom got into an accident. You need to come immediately.’ I asked, ‘Is she okay? What happened?’ and she said, ‘You need to come immediately. Someone needs to drive you.’
“I still can’t make sense of this,” Christine said about her mother’s sudden death. “I’m the kind of person who tries to understand why things happen. The logic of it. But I just can’t here.”
“There doesn’t have to be meaning,” said Raúl. “Sometimes shit just happens. Part of it is just being able to let go. Accepting that life has a lot of chaos embedded in it. The human struggle is reconciling that life is chaotic but we’ve managed to control almost all uncertainty. But then one day, a person who is irresponsible runs into our mother.”
“I mean,” Christine said, “she was killed by an idiot. Someone who was being irresponsible and stupid. He doesn’t even know that he ruined a whole family’s life, caused so much destruction. How come he gets to go on and live and my mother is dead? I just felt so hopeless after; nothing made sense. She was just gone. How? And I’m torn between this anger and this part of me that wants to let go and live my life. Move forward.” Slamming her hands down on the table, she said, “I hate humans so much. At the same time, you have to live your life. Move it forward.”
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