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Could Psychedelics Be The Path to Peace for the Dying — and the Bereaved?

What I’ve learned about tripping toward eternity

Jan M Flynn
10 min readOct 18, 2021
Image by sharon-mccutcheon-r6_xcsNg0kw-unsplash.jpg

A few months ago, one of my best friends introduced me to an organization called End Well

A non-profit foundation, it was founded in 2017 by Dr. Shoshana Ungerleider, who hosts the TED Health Podcast and is a frequent medical contributor on CNN, MSNBC and CBS News. She’s a doctor of internal medicine who, after seeing so many patients suffer great physical and emotional pain as they died in a hospital surrounded by strangers, figured there had to be a better way.

The operating belief of End Well is that “all people should experience the end of life in a way that matches their values and goals” and that a cultural shift in thinking about mortality could eliminate a lot of needless suffering. Bringing leaders and advocates together from healthcare, design/tech, and the community, in its first four years End Well has attracted a lot of high-level attention.

I’ve reached a stage in life wherein the prospect of mortality has gone from being a distant unpleasantness, best ignored, to an unavoidable, approaching certainty. I am not terminally ill and, thank God, neither is my husband nor my sons. But dire…

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Jan M Flynn
Jan M Flynn

Written by Jan M Flynn

Novelist, essayist, inner space explorer. GRIFFIN SPEAKER, book one of a middle grade fantasy series, coming from Disney-Hyperion in spring 2026.

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