#46 — Can You Hope for an Afterlife That Was Your Partner's Worst Nightmare?

Content note: This episode includes discussion of suicide, physician-assisted death, psychosis, and serious illness. Listener discretion advised.

The caller and their late partner met when they were nineteen. For the better part of a decade they were each other's person, the one you call with good news, bad news, or at 4am when you can't stop thinking about what it will feel like to stop existing. For most of that time, the caller was the one afraid of death. Their partner wasn't. Then their partner, searching for anything that might work against treatment-resistant depression, tried psilocybin. It went badly enough that they developed schizophrenia. The person who used to be at peace with the idea of nothing spent the rest of their life terrified of a very specific something, an afterlife they'd seen in that trip and believed was waiting for them.

What follows is not a straight line. There's electroconvulsive therapy and the brain damage that came with it. A period that looked, briefly, like hope: the partner coming out as trans, seeming more alive than they had in years. A breakup that was really an act of care. A vein at the temple that only shows when someone is dangerously underweight, and doctors who looked past it. And, in the end, something the caller is careful to call by its real name: a death with dignity, chosen with a death doula, not a crisis.

The caller talks about all of it, including where they are now: still afraid of death, but less afraid than before, because for the first time in their life they're the one hoping something comes next. Not despite what happened to their partner, but because of it.

Stay through to the very end of this one. There's a moment after the main conversation closes that's worth waiting for.

Topics covered:

08:36 — A song about ghosts in a forest, and designing an afterlife around apoptosis

15:15 — Two people equally obsessed with death, terrified of it and drawn to it in opposite directions

24:02 — A last-resort psilocybin trip that led to a diagnosis of schizophrenia

26:12 — Electroshock therapy, brain damage, and a false spring that looked like healing

39:57 — A friend's theory that memory is physical, and grief as a neurotransmitter

55:28 — [Bonus Memory] A backyard wedding with a demonic dog as witness

Related episodes:

• Anonymous #4 — What Happens When Sudden Loss Turns You Into a Ghost In Your Own Life?

• Anonymous #25 — How Do You Love Someone You Know You're Going to Lose?

• Anonymous #32 — What Do You Do With a Faith That Can't Explain the Worst Thing That Happened to You?

Book recommendation: The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov — see the full list of Anonymous Book Recommendations here.

If you'd like to watch this conversation instead of just listening, you can find the video version on YouTube.

If you're not sure where to start, the Episode Guide can help you find a place to start based on where you are.

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