Processing Grief: A Session Three Months After Loss

My partner of nine years died in December. I am a person who processes things intellectually and I had been doing a very thorough job of understanding my grief — reading about attachment theory, talking to my therapist, understanding the research on complicated grief. I was not feeling it. Three months after her death I was functional, informed, and numb.

I had used psilocybin recreationally maybe five times over the previous decade. I went into this session with a specific intention: I want to feel this loss.

I prepared more carefully than any previous session. I cleaned my apartment and set up the space we used to share most — the living room. I put her photograph on what I suppose you'd call an altar, though I'm not a spiritual person. I made a playlist that included music she loved. I wrote my intention in my journal and read it aloud before taking the medicine.

2.5g Mazatapec. At 90 minutes the initial waves had passed and I was present but not yet deep. I added 1g more.

What followed is difficult to describe without sounding dramatic, but I'll try to be precise: the grief arrived. Not as thought — as physical sensation that I understood was grief the way I understand that touching a hot surface is pain. It was enormous and it lasted for what felt like a long time. I cried in ways I hadn't since I was a child.

At some point that phase resolved into something else — not happiness, but a quality of presence with her memory that felt different from numbness. I spent time in a state that felt like conversation. This may sound like a grief delusion. I think of it as my brain doing the processing I had been preventing with understanding.

What was different in the months after: the numbness broke. That's the only way I can describe it. The grief became available — not constantly overwhelming, but present and workable. My therapist described it as movement in a place that had been stuck. The session didn't resolve grief. Nothing resolves grief. It made the grief available to do its work.