came to my aunt Ruthellen and watched, horrified, as her face slowly
transformed into Judith’s. Ruthellen and Judith were both artists, and
both had been diagnosed with breast cancer around the same time. The
cancer had killed Ruthellen and spared Judith. So what was Judith doing
down here among the unmourned dead? Had I been defending myself
against that possibility all this time? Heart wide open, defenses melting,
the tears began to flow.
• • •
I’VE LEFT OUT one important part of my journey to the underworld: the
soundtrack. Before going back under for this last passage, I had asked
Mary to please stop playing spa music and put on something classical. We
settled on the second of Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites, performed by
Yo-Yo Ma. The suite in D minor is a spare and mournful piece that I’d
heard many times before, often at funerals, but until this moment I had
never truly listened to it.
Though “listen” doesn’t begin to describe what transpired between me
and the vibrations of air set in motion by the four strings of that cello.
Never before has a piece of music pierced me as deeply as this one did
now. Though even to call it “music” is to diminish what now began to
flow, which was nothing less than the stream of human consciousness,
something in which one might glean the very meaning of life and, if you
could bear it, read life’s last chapter. (A question formed: Why don’t we
play music like this at births as well as funerals? And the answer came
immediately: there is too much life-already-lived in this piece, and
poignancy for the passing of time that no birth, no beginning, could
possibly withstand it.)
Four hours and four grams of magic mushroom into the journey, this
is where I lost whatever ability I still had to distinguish subject from
object, tell apart what remained of me and what was Bach’s music.
Instead of Emerson’s transparent eyeball, egoless and one with all it
beheld, I became a transparent ear, indistinguishable from the stream of
sound that flooded my consciousness until there was nothing else in it,
not even a dry tiny corner in which to plant an I and observe. Opened to
the music, I became first the strings, could feel on my skin the exquisite