Luke says he met God for the first time 19 years ago. The encounter began gently—his spirit tugged out of its frame, sliding upwards into a brilliant fluorescence. Then everything slowed. He was there for what felt like a million years. Luke had crashed his motorbike on an island a few miles off the coast of the Thai mainland, fracturing his skull. Doctors induced a coma that lasted almost two weeks. Asleep, pictures from his life blurred along his periphery as that legendary bright light washed over him. Luke was 22 and he was dying. As he tells it, “It was pure bliss.”

But the comfort was temporary. The light dimmed, and suddenly a constellation of stars arranged themselves into a giant hand that pointed a finger down at him. A voice that could only belong to God commanded him to return. There were still things he had to do. He then felt himself pour, like molten glass gushing into a shape, back into his body. He awoke affixed to a breathing tube and attached to an IV drip.

Luke had always been prone to fixations. He moved to Thailand because he fell in love with scuba diving, hooked after first disappearing beneath the surface tension of a pool in Southern England. But after the crash, Luke’s new obsessions assumed a preordained nature. The outcome of the accident was miraculous—he was, for the most part, physically unaffected, but for a lingering feeling of pure ecstasy—and every new pursuit carried with it a kind of teleological rudder, each day holding buoyant direction. In three months, he would meet his future wife, Mary, while working as a security guard outside a Tesco’s. She asked more than once if they had met before, gripped by a strange familiarity. Luke took it as a sign, an indication that they had repeatedly missed each other in past lives. “That was the last time we’d meet,” he told me.

It would take about 18 months for the bliss of Luke’s Near-Death Experience (NDE) to wane. When it did, he found that he couldn’t maintain focus and his memory was deteriorating. According to his hospital records, he couldn’t remember short sequences of numbers on a page, even those he had just read aloud. Voices began to overwhelm him, cascading chatter at random. He went to a head-injury specialist who diagnosed him with PTSD and prescribed him an SSRI. Luke struggled with the medication. What little sleep he got was interrupted by night terrors; worse, he couldn’t ejaculate. After two increasingly sleepless, sexless years, Luke stopped taking Sertraline and turned his focus on buying a house for him and his girlfriend, believing that a new home would restore normalcy to his life. “I thought it’d be nice for Mary to see what I was like before all these things happened to me,” he said. In those days, Mary sometimes thought of leaving him.

But Mary loved him too much to seriously consider leaving. Six months after they bought the house, Luke had his worst breakdown. A coworker filling in for him veered their company truck into a tree, his skull missing the trunk by mere inches, and Luke saw it, or heard it, by way of voices or intuition—he can’t remember. But he knew, and felt certain, that a man’s near-death was his fault. Distraught, he took six months off work and started googling. Daily, he conducted his searches, repeating and reordering the terms—NDE, PTSD, SSRI, cure—until he came across a Terence McKenna lecture on ayahuasca’s palliative properties. He had found his answer. He searched for a study that might allow him to take psychedelics cheaply, but the participant requirements were too specific. “A researcher told me, ‘You can’t get [in] my study because you're not an alcoholic,’” he said. “It's like, you know what? I'll do it myself.”

Luke first tried five grams of psilocybin truffles he ordered online. The drug soaked the room with the smell of ammonia and had a consistency like wet bark, but the trip worked. It felt, he said, like the trauma from the crash had been tangibly, forcibly, pushed out of him—“like Mike Tyson had literally punched me in the face.” As Mary watched quietly, he began weeping. The euphoria that succeeded his Near-Death Experience had returned—if briefly. Nine years into their relationship, this was the first time Mary had seen him cry.

I met Luke a year ago, and became fascinated by his story. His dual insight into the dying and psychedelic processes has made him a physical embodiment of two fields that are rapidly converging. This timely synthesis could widen the empirical tools available to investigate perhaps our most timeless question: What happens to us when we die?

*

In 1766, a French military physician described a pattern among patients who had seemingly died and returned to life. One young man, after falling unconscious for a concerningly long time during a routine phlebotomy, reported seeing “such a pure and extreme light that he thought he was in Heaven.” He wasn’t alone, said the doctor. “Other individuals of various ages and sexes reported a very similar sensation in the same circumstances.”

It would take two centuries for this sensation to be given a name. In 1975, Raymond Moody, then a medical student at the Medical College of Georgia, published Life After Life, a landmark study of the experience of consciousness in unconscious moments. Moody interviewed “approximately 50” people who “reported unusual experiences” after resuscitation. From their testimonies, he identified 15 elements that made up a repeatable phenomenon: Near-Death Experience.

But since the publication of Life After Life, which proliferated some of the most ubiquitous clichés that attend our popular imagination of death, such as the bright light, the science around NDEs has been slow to develop, limited in large part by the subjects it intends to study. It is difficult for a researcher to be present when a subject has begun dying, and even more difficult to predict which of those subjects won’t actually die. There is also no way to know whether an experience of near-death will produce, in the person for whom it occurs, the phenomenon we call an NDE. The field overwhelmingly relies on subjective narratives, often told long after the actual event itself. But over the past half-decade, researchers have looked elsewhere to investigate the experience of dying. Motivated in large part by the analogous narratives that other disruptions of consciousness—fainting, hypnosis—elicit, there is growing interest in the potential for a model that could mirror the phenomenology of NDEs.

The psychedelic model is among the oldest of these analogues, and the last half-decade has brought with it a renewed interest in the comparison between the dying experience and the psychedelic trip. In 2018, Chris Timmerman, a fellow at the Center for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London, administered intravenous DMT to 13 volunteers. Their trips were rated against the standard scale used for measuring NDEs, known as the Greyson Scale, and then compared to age and gender-matched narratives taken from a database of NDEs at the University of Liège in Belgium. The Greyson Scale, created by Bruce Greyson, one of the founding fathers of the field, includes 16 measures, each scaled between 0–2. These figures divide the experience into four distinct categories that evaluate the cognitive, affective, paranormal, and transcendental features of the experience. An “official” NDE occurs when a subject scores a seven or higher (out of 32). In Timmerman’s study, every measure was comparable in the two groups (the only exception being that those who had NDEs more commonly came to a “border or point of no return”).

Though Timmerman’s paper received media attention and was advertised as proof that DMT really does “feel like dying,” Timmerman himself remains more skeptical. “I think that the modeling of the psychedelic experience for NDE is incomplete,” he told me, owing in part to the rudimentary quality of the available survey tools. The Greyson Scale is designed to reduce near-death to a categorizable standard, but the deliberate breadth of the 16 determining questions flattens the specificity of the experience. Some of the questions, for example, ask participants to think of their NDE not in terms of particular memories, but through a prescriptive self-assessment of their transformation: Did you feel a sense of harmony or unity with the universe? Did you suddenly seem to understand everything?

“I'd say that the way that we sample experiences is still [too] rudimentary to assert that we could fully model a psychological experience,” Timmerman said. One participant in his study, when given a placebo, scored high enough on the Greyson Scale to have had an authentic NDE while sober in the laboratory.

But despite the measurement’s limitations, if the neurophysiology really is analogous, the prospect could dramatically change the field of NDE research. For decades, researchers relied on retrospective interviews that sometimes stretched back decades, hooked up rats to brain scans and induced heart-attacks, and waited in the corridors of emergency rooms for the unlikely chance a victim of cardiac arrest would live and remember what they saw. Psychedelics, however imperfect, could provide a possible shortcut. What if a drug could do in 30 minutes what once took months or years of trial and error?

*

After an NDE, people can be gripped by a renewed sense of purpose or imbued with a feeling that they are an elect of God, accompanied by a dissipation of their fear of dying. The latter sensation, perhaps the NDE’s most universal indicator, is also widespread in users of psychedelics.

Pascal Michael, a researcher at the University of Greenwich, recently published a case study documenting two individuals who had experienced both an NDE and a so-called changa trip (changa is a type of smokable DMT). In the second of the two cases, a man named DA experienced a “histaminergic reaction” after being stung on the nose by a plant whose tip had mutated. Almost immediately, he felt a painful kind of heat riding up the back of his neck. He then started hallucinating: images of the Buddha’s face bled into kaleidoscopic fractals before he felt himself merging with the Buddha’s eyes. “I was dwelling in this blueness,” he said. “It was a very lovely feeling.”

In the weeks after DA’s allergic reaction, he went through a “a heightened state” of consciousness: A condition that led to an obsessive compulsion to explain both the onset of his hallucinations and the feeling that he was living in a different realm from the one that preceded his NDE. It finally ended with the belief that “the only logical explanation was I must be dead.” When the feelings eventually subsided, the man still struggled with the question of his own mortality, an anxiety that only relented when he concluded, “I might be dead, I might be alive, whichever way round—it’s still the same thing.”

Despite the growing interest in NDE research, the negative potentials of the experience remain under-explored. Studies have estimated that up to one in five NDEs could have traumatic effects on the individual. Some people find themselves locked in an empty blackness, while others end up in a kind of hell. Researchers attribute the dearth of such investigations to trauma—people are too afraid to revisit the experience. But changa was a tool that had allowed DA to safely return to his dying experience, Michael explained. Adverse NDEs can have a crystallizing effect on memory: participants are so afraid to recall the trauma that their recollection becomes rigid. But what if psychedelics could allow a partial confrontation with the NDE, unlocking previously buried details and enriching the specificity of their narratives in retrospect?

Michael is among the few researchers focusing specifically on comparing NDEs to psychedelic experiences. Such a devotion to death demands a kind of necroholism. As a child, Michael told me, he often experienced “pre-grief”: an unrelenting fear that could slide into panic, born of the knowledge that both he and everyone he loved would die.

Michael’s obsession with his research ultimately pulled him away from his father. And while the research was still ongoing, his father died from COVID complications. They were still living together. It’s an irony—how a fixation with dying estranged him from the death of the man he was once closest to—that he seems still yet to overcome. “I’ve continued the research,” he told me. “And I’m still very much at odds as to whether it’s even a good idea to keep going.” I spent a day with him late last June. We spoke for a few hours on a park bench overlooking the River Thames, just outside the University of Greenwich, where he is affiliated. His recent work has focused mostly on subjects, like DA, who have had both an NDE and psychedelic experiences. It’s a sample that is of growing intrigue in the field.

Luke was among the first of these double-experience subjects that Michael interviewed. Though he was by then no longer in search of studies to help him afford his psychedelic use, Luke felt a kind of dutiful commitment to NDE research. The feeling was founded, in large part, on his conviction that psychedelics were curing him (he maintains now that his PTSD would be completely cured if he could only take DMT three days a week). In a two-hour interview, Michael prodded Luke for insights about the intersection. “Just the clarity was different,” Luke said. “Alan Watts hits the nail on the fucking head. What if when we die, we wake up? I love that. …We really do wake up, honestly. That’s what it felt like.”

The hope with surveying these individuals is that it could reduce potentially conflicting variables—they are, after all, comparing the same brain. But the insights have proven contradictory. Even when double experiencers assert, as they have in Michael’s interviews, that the two transcendental encounters are linked (by, for example, intersecting testimonies about entering an alternate reality or the feeling of leaving one’s physical body) qualitative analyses of the actual experiences diverge, undermining the connection. In late August, Chris Timmerman and Charlotte Martial, a neuroscientist at the University of Liège and perhaps near-death’s most prolific contemporary researcher, published a quantitative analysis comparing these populations. They found that overlap mostly occurred when participants were asked to interpret the meaning of their experience, rather than recall specific phenomena. These congruent interpretations, Timmerman contends, are conclusions that are not rigid. “And because it's constantly evolving, it is more detached from the actual experience itself, and therefore it lends itself to more bias,” he added. Psychedelic trips might only feel so similar to NDEs because our experiences of mysticism are so few and far between—it may, in fact, be closer to the difference between looking through a telescope and setting foot on the moon.

When Luke described his own psychedelic trips to me, he did so at length and in tortuous turns that invoked the extraterrestrial as often as they evoked the divine: it was like I was serving God. The NDE, by comparison, was closer to shaking His hand. These stories were difficult to follow, and when I asked Luke to slow down, he often sighed, bemoaning my psychedelic virginity. He maintained, always, that I would never understand the experience until I did it myself. And as our conversations grew more frequent, almost weekly, I found that he saw in my fascination with him the opportunity to play the role of missionary. That is to say, he kept talking to me because he was determined to get me to trip.

It was obvious that Luke measured all of his psychedelic experiences aspiring toward the NDE. “In the NDE, I got to go home,” he told me once, dragging “home” out like a wistful sigh. Now a decade removed from his darkest period, Luke had found respite in a kind of paradox, a satiation for life in steadily increasing psychedelic increments that brought him closer to death. I asked him once to compare the two. “What’s the difference between the DMT and dying? Dying’s better. Nothing’s as good as death.”

*

Many of the most popular theories that attempt to explain NDEs rely on the premise that the mind functions independently of the brain, an umbrella of ideas known as trans-materialism. It's a framework whose guiding principles—that consciousness could persist after death, for example—can be ill-suited for the scientific reliance on observation, reflecting both the spiritual roots of the field and the experiential feedback of many of its users. Many proponents of psychedelics seem to believe that the drug is undeniable proof of the soul. In October, for example, novelist Tao Lin wrote about how his DMT trips were clarified through his research into Near-Death Experiences, helping him understand that “at 41 I believe I’m an embodied soul that death will release into that mysterious realm.” The psychologist Kenneth Ring, who co-founded the International Association for Near-Death Studies (the field’s only dedicated organization) saw in NDEs a capacity for messianic impact, describing them, in his book, Heading Towards Omega, as “harbingers of humanity’s psycho-spiritual evolution.”

There has been, however, a growing emphasis on empiricism, the product of a class of researchers who believe that NDEs, and by extension, consciousness, exist wholly in the workings of the brain. Such mechanistic explanations have begun to shift the field’s trans-material paradigm. In 2022, a case study was published showing continuous gamma activity—brain waves linked to the formation of memory—in the brain of a man from Zhengzhou, China as he transitioned to death. A year later, researchers from the University of Michigan noticed a similar uptake in brain activity in two patients who began dying when taken off ventilator support.

The psychedelic model is among the earliest evidence of these material explanations. In 1990, psychiatrist Karl Jansen argued that, in times of extreme stress, a ketamine-like endogenous neuroprotective agent may be released. This “agent” could explain the similarities between ketamine-induced trips and NDEs—that, in effect, they are the same experience.

But trans-materialists have sustained their argument on the insistence that these mechanistic explanations have never been shown to actually occur in NDEs, this “naturally occurring ketamine-like substance” has never been identified in humans before. “It is really unbelievably compelling [to think] that we’ve got it all explained,” Michael told me of the material explanation. “That it is just naivete to think that Near-Death Experiences are unmitigated proof of an afterlife.” But every single material explanation remains indefinite and the field is littered with case studies that cannot be scientifically explained. A subject will, say, return from the throes of death and be able to describe, with a precision available only to the conscious, what happened around them while they were comatose. In the opening left by the blank spots of material explanations, this specificity can invite a little doubt. Or, as Michael told me, “It can really put you in a fucking crisis.”

For those who are critical of these physical interpretations, the psychedelic model is another dead end. Sam Parnia, an intensive care physician who is among the world’s leading resuscitation specialists and a supporter of the potential of trans-materialism, told me, in an email, that the psychedelic explanation “is like taking a false positive COVID test in people with lung cancer and claiming COVID and lung cancer are the same thing.” He maintained that the model reflects a “confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance” among those who are investigating it. “Their beliefs bear nothing with reality because they fail to study the phenomena properly and in an unbiased manner and accept the realities that come out of it.”

One of the researchers Parnia was accusing of this confirmation bias was Charlotte Martial, perhaps near-death’s most prolific contemporary researcher. When I brought his criticisms to her, she told me that she actually agreed with some of them, that she understood that the two experiences aren’t the same, but that psychedelics remain a useful tool for “studying subjective experiences that resemble NDEs in controlled laboratory settings.” The key, she asserted, was to continue moving toward empiricism in a field whose early history was pockmarked with “the tendency of some authors to present their opinions as if they were empirically supported facts.”

These unsubstantiated claims have resulted in what Martial has described as a lack of “neuroscientific expertise” in the field. The belief, for example, that a conscious experience can happen in the absence of neurophysiological activity—that a brain can operate when it’s dead—is central to the trans-materialist argument. Martial draws this line in the sand not out of spite, but out of necessity: the trans-material paradigm has not produced any new evidence in the 40 years since it was first proposed. And though those researchers have been instrumental in the field’s development, their insistence on a trans-material explanation assumes that the fascination with NDEs lies solely in their potential as a bridge to other worlds. “It reflects the fact that the field of NDE research (at least in [part]), is biased by a widely held belief that there is something fundamentally special, if not supernatural, about NDEs,” Martial wrote in a 2022 article criticizing Parnia’s proposed approach for studying death.

But, as the scholar of religion and NDEs Carol Zaleski writes, “Even if it is possible to account for every feature of near-death experience under every condition in which it occurs, the task of interpretation remains unfinished.” In other words, an explanatory framework may offer a definite origin to dying, but the consequence of the experience hinges on an understanding formed separately from the physical change that has occurred. Wonder is found in the sense made, not in the brain affected.

*

Most published NDE narratives describe life after death in the terms and truisms of the hero’s journey: Dying, or almost dying, inspires a renewed quest to find one’s earthly purpose. But the NDErs I interviewed did not conform to this storybook progression, nor was the nature of their purpose so immediately clear. The effects of the NDE on their lives, it seemed to me, were a product of the meaning they made of the experience—of the story they eventually constructed for themselves. In Strangers to Ourselves, Rachel Aviv writes that our reliance on psychiatric models to treat mental illness fails in part because it “may also estrange us from the many scales of understanding required, especially in periods of illness or crisis, to maintain a continuous sense of self.” NDE research, it seems to me, also falls victim to this preoccupation with a physical, individual explanation. NDErs construct their personal narrative—deduce their earthly cause for living—with, and often against, the community of which they are a part. These conclusions can dramatically shift the consequent effects of the NDE; they are pivotal in shaping a subject’s relationship to death, for example. But how they come to be forged, and whether they have a positive effect, is inseparable from the relationship an NDEr builds with “the rest of us who are trying to make sense of things without the aid of direct revelation,” as Zaleski writes.

While I was in London, I met with a former student of Michael’s who had been through both an NDE and psychedelic experiences. Brandon arrived late to our meeting. He’d lost his phone on the train, a fact he seemed surprisingly unbothered by. He had grown up in Nigeria, and had his Near-Death Experience at 11 after a bout of Typhoid was exacerbated by an allergic reaction to the antimalarial drug Chloroquine. Though many of the features of his own NDE were not unique, Brandon took great care to describe the scenes from his life that were presented to him in a corridor of images. “People suffering,” past, present and future, “with this, with that, with everything.” The path led into a room and a beacon of light washed everything white. A voice offered him two choices: stay, or go back and live through the misery of mortal life. “I want to say this because it makes me feel great,” he said, his eyes welling with tears. “That even as a kid, I saw the suffering I was returning to, and I didn’t shy away from it.”

Brandon was raised in the Anglican Church, and so the immediate effects of his NDE emerged in a sort of personal rebellion. “I knew there was something truer than all of this,” he said of Christianity. At 12, he stopped attending church but kept his reasons private. He feared that if he told anyone why he would “end up in a psychiatry ward,” or “would be exorcized.” He was certain that what he saw was real, a conviction that throttled a worldview built on a belief in “the Christian conception of life, death, the afterlife and judgment.” But Brandon told me he had no other language through which he could parse what he had seen, and this Christian articulation of his NDE mutated the experience. He began hearing voices that accused him of being the devil, and though the hallucinations were jarring at first, their charge made sense to him. Only the devil, he figured, would be inundated with such overwhelming evidence against the Christian doctrine. He thought then that God had let him live as a test of his faith. If he could refute the things he had seen while dying, he told me, he could prove his conviction and, finally, “find salvation.”

For Luke, salvation took a different form. Though the first trip with psilocybin had reoriented some of his personal trauma from the initial crash, he remained a distant partner to Mary. An epiphany following an ayahuasca trip revealed to him that his destiny was to be a husband and father. He logged onto Facebook early the next morning and posted a message for her: “You mean the world to me. I love you.” It may seem trite—a repressed man takes drugs, gets sentimental—but Mary says that Luke returned from the trip a different person. When she picked him up from the airport, he burst into the car, rambling about the details of their coming wedding, about God and how much he missed her. They soon married, after a five-year engagement.

I couldn’t help my wariness that psychedelics helped Luke discover and maintain his life’s mission in the construction of a nuclear family—what he often described to me as “the American dream, mate.” Psychedelics were a guide that seemed to precede all other influence, including his own wife’s. He was convinced, for example, that they should have their first child after a vision during a psychedelic ceremony; a spirit instructed him to tell Mary to remove her IUD. He called her the next morning, and when, by way of cancellation, an appointment with her OB-GYN had opened, he felt it confirmed the credibility of the command.

At the same time, it is clear how much purpose his family brings him and how much they adore him. And Mary welcomes the changes brought on by Luke’s psychedelic use; she seems acutely conscious of the drug’s role in his life. At this point, Luke hasn’t done a psychedelic in almost two years. His rolodex of memories has sustained him, and the responsibilities of fatherhood have left little time for drug-taking. One night, as Mary and Luke tucked their children into bed, their daughter Amelia asked if I could stay the night with them. “I have a bunk bed,” she appealed. When Mary explained that I was staying at a hotel nearby and would return tomorrow, Amelia grinned. “I like it when friends come by.”

Luke chuckled, and mumbled to himself, “Well, because Daddy doesn’t have friends.”

“Daddy doesn’t really have friends, no,” said Mary.

That morning, Luke and I had gotten into an argument about 9/11 conspiracies. Luke believed the day’s events were orchestrated by the American government, and it occurred to me then, for the first time, that his incessant certainty about the underlying dynamics of the world could be a bit unbearable. It was the same conviction that willed him toward fatherhood, one formed in isolation. If the enlightening effects of the NDE were to be maintained—if Luke was to fulfill his life’s mission—then he had to turn away from the everyday relationships that did not support his certitude. His NDE was incompatible with society.

After Amelia was asleep, I asked Luke if he really didn’t have any friends.

“Mary’s my best friend,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “After Mary, then who?”

“Probably Pinky,” Luke said, looking at either Mary or the rose-hued teddy bear from her childhood. He sounded like he was joking, but Luke said the bear spoke to them. Its eyes, uneven and fraying, were made out of makeshift buttons, more than 20 years old.

*

More than anything, I had come to England with the intention of tripping with Luke. The morning I landed, he bought a tent for us to share in his backyard. It was on sale, he said—another sign—and he showed me the jar of psilocybin spore strains he had bought online. A sustainable supply, he explained, meant he could grow mushrooms at home indefinitely. Across the kitchen, pinned on the fridge, were crayon drawings his children had made. Their little shoes were tucked in the corner. I asked Luke how much he thought I should do. “You need to do four, four, four,” he said. “Like the coach number.” Four grams of mushrooms, three days in a row, matching the bus number I took to get to their home.

Not long after that conversation, I told Luke that I wouldn’t be taking any psychedelics with him. The dosage scared me, but I came to the decision because the intended outcome—a reach towards the NDE’s enlightenment—by then seemed to me a cursed reward. Above all else, Near-Death Experiences seem to endow those who have them with the burden of certainty. Certainty, at times, of a greater God. Certainty, at least, that there is a specific reason for their living. Such a conviction, when thrust against the doubt and helplessness of the lived world, must be delicately maintained. That promise of NDEs, not unlike extreme religiosity or even cultism, depends on the consistent, deliberate estrangement from doubt. But there is no doctrine for those who have died and come back to life. Therein, then, lies the appeal of psychedelics—an invocation that reminds people that what they have seen is indeed possible, that there is no reason to doubt its feasibility.

I had imagined that such certainty might be rapturous—are we not all desperate for purpose? But instead, among the people I spoke to, it increasingly appeared rather lonely. The experience of an NDE resembles the experience of tremendous grief. There are limits to its description and ability to be shared. In its wake, every occurrence, however mundane, bends around the orbit of that single event. It is isolating, impossible to understand without having lived it. But it seems to me, particularly in the case of NDEs, that there is something to be gained by paying attention to the miraculous ways that people keep living.

There are, of course, other reasons for study: As the psychedelic renaissance is dragged towards pathology and prescription, NDE research, for better or worse, does not lag far behind. Some NDE researchers have proposed that psychedelics could eventually be used to relieve hospice patients’ anxieties about death. And, of course, researchers still hope that NDEs could help pinpoint the true origins of consciousness.

Whether these pursuits ever materialize is secondary to what these accounts of NDEs already offer us. Following great, destabilizing experiences—whether a mental break or a Near-Death Experience—the brain tends to evade comprehension. But unlike the disorder of the psychotic, for example, the NDEr almost always inherits a reason for their breakdown. Understanding how they make sense of that reason, perhaps even more so than discovering its cause, can teach us a great deal about the transformative power of explanation—of story.

My last morning with Luke, I came by his home to say goodbye. The kids were on vacation and headed to the pool that afternoon, and the family was watching Bluey, a children’s show about a dog family of four. It was Amelia’s favorite, but Luke loved the show, too. Earlier, he had told me with excitement about an episode where the show’s creators break the fourth wall, demonstrating to the audience how they make the cartoon. He thought they were sending a broader message about the nature of life, the existence of God. “I know those guys were on DMT,” he told me, tearing up. I’m unsure if Luke will ever grow to find a community of friends, and I worry about what that will mean for his kids in the coming years. But huddled together on the couch in the sweet slowness of summer, I wouldn’t have changed a thing. ♦