Lisa Callaghan

Lisa Callaghan is the wife of Patrick Mettes and the person through whom the book traces the changes his psilocybin session brought into their shared life. She first opposed his decision to enter a New York University trial, fearing it offered an easy way out when she wanted him to keep fighting. Over the months that followed, however, she saw him become more patient and more present in ordinary pleasures. When cancer finally took him, she understood the session not as a retreat from life but as part of how he was able to live—and die—with greater peace.

Identity and Background

In 2010, Callaghan was working as a marketing executive for a cookware company. She and Patrick had been married for years when his illness reshaped their lives: three years after his cancer diagnosis, she noticed that the whites of his eyes had turned yellow. By 2010, the cancer had spread to his lungs, and the chemotherapy was especially debilitating. The possibility that he might not survive had become difficult to ignore.

The book presents Callaghan primarily through her relationship with Patrick: as the person who feared losing him, shared the consequences of his treatment, and later recalled the final months of his life. Her perspective is not identical to his. She initially interpreted his wish to try psilocybin as a sign that he had given up, while he believed there was still something to learn and do. That difference mattered: the trial began not with shared certainty, but with a disagreement about what it meant to keep fighting.

Opposition and the Decision to Enter the Trial

On an April Monday in 2010, Patrick read a front-page New York Times article about renewed medical research into hallucinogens and learned that New York University was testing psilocybin to relieve existential distress in cancer patients. Although he had no prior experience with psychedelics, he decided at once to call and volunteer. Callaghan opposed the plan. She did not want him to find what she feared might be an easy way out; she wanted him to fight the cancer.

Patrick called anyway. After completing forms and answering questions, he was accepted into the trial and assigned to Tony Bossis. Callaghan’s resistance did not prevent his participation, but it reveals the stakes she perceived in it. For her, entering the study could look like surrender. For Patrick, the possibility of confronting his anxiety and depression seemed worth pursuing. Their difference would later be altered by what he brought back from the session, though the account does not suggest that the treatment removed the grief or difficulty of the illness.

Witness to the Session and Its Immediate Effects

In January 2011, Callaghan had an important work meeting and could not accompany Patrick to the treatment room at New York University’s dental school. He traveled there alone from their Brooklyn apartment. Before the session, he had set an intention to cope better with the anxiety and depression surrounding his cancer and to work on what he called his regret in life. He placed photographs of himself and Callaghan on their wedding day, along with one of their dog, Arlo, around the room.

After the Friday session, Patrick labored through the weekend to make sense of the experience and write an account, as participants in the trial were asked to do. Callaghan agreed to let the book’s narrator read his account and also authorized Bossis to share his session notes and notes from follow-up psychotherapy. Her role in the account is thus both intimate and evidentiary: she recalls what changed in their home life, while helping make Patrick’s own record of the experience available.

When she arrived to take him home after the session, Patrick looked exhausted, but she remembered him as full of things he wanted to tell her and unable to put all of them into words. He told her that he had touched the face of God. The force of that report did not make her an equivalent witness to his private experience; rather, she encountered it through his changed manner and what he could communicate afterward.

A Changed Attention to Ordinary Life

Patrick lived seventeen months after the session. Callaghan recalled that those months brought unexpected satisfactions alongside his gradual acceptance that he was going to die. She had initially taken his decision to join the trial as evidence that he had stopped fighting. In retrospect, she saw the opposite in his response: he became convinced that he still had much to do, much love to give and receive, and was not ready to leave his wife. His attention shifted from the prospect of death toward how to live the time that remained.

The change appeared in everyday circumstances, not only in what Patrick said about the session. He continued chemotherapy, and his spirits improved. During a calamitous summer renovation of their Brooklyn apartment, the couple still argued, and Callaghan described the period as hell on earth. Yet she noticed in him a patience he had not previously shown and a renewed joy in being with her. He seemed less caught up in life’s details and more able to enjoy a sandwich or a walk on the promenade. Their time together, she felt, had acquired the density of a lifetime lived within a year.

Callaghan also found herself believing, for a time, that Patrick would not die after all. He knew, she later thought, that he was not going to survive. As his good days became fewer, he walked around the city, tried restaurants for lunch, and told her about the places he had discovered. In March 2012, he told her that he wanted to stop chemotherapy. She understood that decision not as a wish to die, but as a decision that continuing treatment was no longer how he wanted to live.

Death, Grief, and What She Took from the Experience

In the fall, Patrick’s lungs began to fail and he was hospitalized at Mount Sinai. He gathered people around him to say goodbye and explain how he wanted to die. Callaghan described his death as conscious and recalled that his calm affected the people caring for him: nurses and doctors lingered in the palliative-care room, where Patrick talked and offered affection. When Bossis visited a week before Patrick died, he too was struck by the serenity in the room. Patrick was still sad to leave his wife, but, as Bossis recalled, he was not afraid.

Callaghan stayed with Patrick night after night, often talking with him late into the night. He spoke of feeling partly in this world and partly in the next, and asked her not to push him as he found his way. He also tried to comfort her, telling her that life turned like a wheel and that she would eventually be on top again. His final hours brought no easy resolution for her: after days without a shower, she went home for a few hours at her brother’s urging, and Patrick died shortly before she returned. She sat with him for three hours after his death.

Callaghan called it a good death and credited both the people at New York University and Patrick’s psilocybin journey with allowing him to reach deep resources within himself. The account does not present this as a cure: Patrick continued chemotherapy, chose to stop it later, and died of his illness. Instead, Callaghan’s testimony gives the treatment a more bounded significance. She believed it helped change how he met the life and death he could not avoid. She also said that Patrick had been more spiritual than she was; through his experience, she encountered the possibility that the world contained dimensions she had not known. In this way, her arc extends beyond being a witness to his transformation: the journey altered her understanding, too, without erasing the loss at its center.