How to Change Your Mind

naive landscapes and abstractions in spectacular colors; I’d brought one
of them with me to Mary’s room, along with a watercolor of Judith’s. Bob
was a genuinely happy, angst-free man who lived to be ninety-six, his
paintings becoming ever more colorful, abstract, and free toward the end.
To see him so vividly in my reflection was chilling. A few years before,
visiting Bob in the nursing home in the Colorado desert where he would
soon die, I’d watched what had been a fit and vigorous man (it had been
his habit to stand on his head every day well into his eighties) contract
into a parenthesis of skin and bones marooned in a tiny bed. The
esophageal muscles required to swallow had given out, and he was
tethered to a feeding tube. By then, his situation was pitiful in so many
respects, but for some reason I fixed on the fact that never again would a
taste of food ever cross his lips.
I splashed cold water on our joint face and made my unsteady way
back to Mary.
Risking another glance at her, this time I was rewarded by the sight of
a ravishing young woman, blond once again but now in the full radiance
of youth. Mary was so beautiful I had to look away.
She gave me another small mushroom—gram number four—and a
piece of chocolate. Before I put on my eyeshade, I attempted to conduct
the rotating mask test a second time . . . and it was a complete bust,
neither confirming nor disproving the hypothesis. As the mask began to
rotate, gradually bringing its back side into view, the whole thing
dissolved into a gray jelly that slid down the screen of my laptop before I
could determine whether the melting mask I was watching was convex or
concave. So much for conducting psychological experiments while
tripping.
I put on my eyeshades and sank back down into what now became a
cracked and parched desert landscape dense with artifacts and images of
death. Bleached skulls and bones and the faces of the familiar dead
passed before me, aunts and uncles and grandparents, friends and
teachers and my father-in-law—with a voice telling me I had failed to
properly mourn all of them. It was true. I had never really reckoned the
death of anyone in my life; something had always gotten in the way. I
could do it here and now and did.
I looked hard at each of their faces, one after another, with a pity that
seemed bottomless but with no fear whatsoever. Except once, when I