Brooklyn is the domestic setting in the account of Patrick Mettes’s final years, linking his life with Lisa Callaghan to the treatment that changed how he faced his illness. Their apartment provided a point of departure for his journey to a trial elsewhere in New York City and later became the setting for a difficult renovation during the months they spent together after his session.

Home and Treatment

By January 2011, Patrick’s bile-duct cancer had spread to his lungs, and he was undergoing a debilitating course of chemotherapy. He and Lisa lived in Brooklyn. When he entered the New York University psilocybin trial, Lisa had a work meeting on the morning of his session, so Patrick traveled alone by subway from their apartment to the treatment room at the NYU dental school on First Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street. The route makes Brooklyn more than a place name in the account: it was the home from which Patrick entered a clinical setting where he hoped to address his anxiety, depression, and regrets.

Domestic Life After the Session

Patrick lived for seventeen months after the session. In the months that followed, he continued chemotherapy, and Lisa recalled that he had become more patient and found greater joy in ordinary time together. Their Brooklyn apartment also brought a sharp contrast to that new ease: a calamitous renovation made the summer especially trying, yet Lisa felt Patrick was less caught up in daily frustrations and more focused on being with people. He spent his good days walking around the city and trying restaurants, while those good days gradually became fewer.

Place in the Story

Brooklyn holds together the account’s intimate and public settings without being the site of Patrick’s treatment: the apartment was home, the subway connected it to the NYU trial, and the renovation tested their life together afterward. The place thus marks the practical circumstances of their time as a couple, while Patrick’s changing relationship to that time—not escape from illness—becomes the story’s central shift. In March 2012, he told Lisa he wanted to stop chemotherapy; later that year, as his lungs failed, he said goodbye to those gathered around him at Mount Sinai, outside Brooklyn.