A little more than four years ago, my oldest son Rob shot and killed himself. He was 28. He suffered from depression, bipolar disorder, and alcoholism. He also had conflicted feelings about being adopted. Whip-smart, devilish, and funny as f--k, Rob could be a pleasure to hang with, but he lived his whole life with a pain that never left him. When he was a little boy he told me, “I have a space in my heart that never closes.”

In the days after his death, I was crushed yet oddly numb. The whole thing felt surreal and for a long while nothing made sense. Then, little by little, the anesthetic fog lifted and it became painfully clear: Rob was dead. End of story.

Everything you may have heard about losing a child—how it goes against the natural order of things, how afterward you’re never the same—is true, but it only hints at the agony.

Like Rob, I was walking around with a hole in my heart and I just wanted the pain of never seeing him again to stop. Despite joining a grief group and seeing a therapist, I felt hopeless and alone, and in those raw early months I was open to any and all suggestions. I’ve never been religious and didn’t believe in much of anything—until I desperately needed to. I had to believe that Rob’s spirit, soul, cosmic energy, or whatever you want to call it existed in some form somewhere. Not to believe was simply too painful.

My search for otherworldly first aid began with a psychic medium named Fleur who promised to contact Rob’s spirit. You may be rolling your eyes, picturing a grifter who preys on people’s grief—and so was I—but she more than delivered. She told me things that I thought she couldn’t possibly have known, and she informed me that my father, who died shortly after my mom passed more than 40 years ago, was there with Rob to help him transition to the other side. I burst into tears. My dad was a petty criminal who did time in prison while I was growing up. I had never cried for him before.

A few months later, a friend at the dog park confided that her brother had died by suicide and she said that chanting had helped her. So I tried that, too. I wound up in her living room, chanting Nam Myōhō Renge Kyō Nam Myōhō Renge Kyō, which I still can’t believe I agreed to. Near the end of the ceremony, there was a prayer for the deceased. I pictured Rob and began to chant louder, losing myself for just a few seconds, and then it was over and I again bawled like a baby. Crying for Rob became the music of my broken heart.

It shouldn’t have worked. All of this was completely foreign to me. I’m a 67-year-old Jew from Brooklyn, a proudly cynical agnostic. And yet, there I was: converted to L.A. woo-woo. And it was this newfound faith that led me, a few years later, to tripping balls on magic mushrooms, “dying” and communicating with the spirit of my dead son.

I’ve done my share of recreational drugs, but psychedelics always seemed like a kaleidoscopic bridge too far. Between hearing about friends’ bad trips and reading too much Hunter S. Thompson when I was young, I preferred to stay grounded on the lowest plane of consciousness. Maybe it boiled down to this: I was afraid of letting go.

When Rob died, however, there was nothing more to be afraid of and nothing of him to hold on to.

I had read about the psychedelic renaissance and how this class of mind-altering drugs, used for millennia by native cultures for purposes both medicinal and spiritual, have resurfaced from the underground. Recent studies have shown that when used correctly, psychedelics can help relieve depression, anxiety, PTSD, addiction and most importantly (at least for me), grief.

My way in through the doors of perception began with Netflix. Late one night I stumbled across Fantastic Fungi, an entertaining doc about........

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