One year after my mother’s suicide, we took the cruise. Our ship set sail from Fort Lauderdale, and as we motored beyond the coastal lights of Florida, I stood on the balcony of our first-class cabin, watching an apocalyptic sunset smear the sky. Soon we’d be on the open ocean, and from there the stars would show me the way to the Path of Souls. At least, that was my plan. A plan that, I admit, when uttered aloud, made me sound like a child who misunderstands the statement, Mommy has gone to heaven. And so responds, Well, how do I get there to bring her back?

I hung my head over the balcony railing. Several stories below the ship’s turbulent white wake churned the Atlantic, and I wondered whether I was as high up now as my mother was then. I wondered how free she felt letting go. I could let go too, simply drop my duty, the burden of writing this book, and what came next. I could simply chuck the vape pen with the DMT I had smuggled aboard to speed the journey and watch it fall end over end, silently, peacefully into the sea.

Over the past year, I had done the requisite psychotherapy, but it didn’t seem to be reaching the deepest regions of my brain, which is why I needed the DMT, to access the otherwise inaccessible, to find my mother on the Path of Souls before I lost her forever. I knew it was too late to bring her back, but I needed to know why she left, because I feared the answer was me.

In the absence of a note other than Do Not Resuscitate, I was left to wonder. The only thing I was sure of was that I was open to believing just about anything. For example: that dimethyltryptamine simulates a near-death experience and shamans in the Amazon use the DMT in ayahuasca to ascend to the Milky Way where they’re reborn, that both Native Americans and ancient Egyptians believed that after death our soul makes a leap into a portal in the constellation of Orion where it begins a dangerous journey along the Milky Way to the afterlife, that the similarity of these beliefs isn’t a coincidence but rather the result of a link between the cultures deep in prehistory and lost in a great cataclysm caused by a giant comet. Allie mostly indulged my theories—only rarely rolling her eyes.