Healing Together: When Families Journey Through Cancer Grief with Psychedelics

Every year, an estimated 20 million people around the world are diagnosed with cancer. That number is devastating enough. But it becomes exponentially larger when we understand that cancer doesn't just impact individual lives. It detonates like a bomb through entire family systems.

I know this personally. My cancer diagnosis was the explosion. My wife absorbed the blast—suddenly facing the possibility of widowhood. My children caught the shrapnel as they watched their father suffer through surgeries and chemotherapy. My parents, my siblings, my extended family—all of them impacted by the same detonation. Cancer was the bomb. We all live in the crater it created.

I'm grateful for the support cancer patients receive. But sometimes we lose sight of everyone else caught in the blast radius. The husbands and wives. The mothers and fathers. The sisters and brothers. The aunts and uncles and cousins who grieve while trying to stay strong for the person they love.

Psychedelic medicines show promise for reducing depression, anxiety and existential distress in individual cancer patients. But they might also offer something we discuss less often: the possibility of families healing together rather than suffering alone.

During my recent podcast conversation with Ismail Ali, co-Executive Director at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Science (MAPS), he shared a powerful story about how his family used ayahuasca to process grief after his mother's cancer journey. His courageous story matters because it addresses dual stigmas that keep families isolated in their suffering.

The Dual Silence

Cancer grief carries stigma. We don't know how to talk about it. We don't know what to say when someone tells us their loved one has cancer. We change the subject. We offer platitudes. We disappear because the discomfort is unbearable. And so we stay silent. 

Psychedelic use carries different stigma. Decades of drug war propaganda. Legal risks. Social judgment. The assumption that people using these medicines are reckless or irresponsible rather than seeking healing. And so we stay silent. 

Ismail recognized early in his career that these stigmas create impossible silence. "One of the big issues that the field, with a stigmatized issue, has to navigate is who says what about what," he told me. The psychedelic community has struggled with a paradox: nutritionists aren't expected to hide their diets, but psychedelic researchers face career consequences for acknowledging personal experience with the medicines they study.

This silence extends to families. Put cancer stigma together with psychedelic stigma and families suffer in profound isolation. We can't talk about the grief. We can't talk about exploring alternative approaches to that grief. We suffer in silence.

Ismail made a choice to break that silence. "I made what I felt like was kind of a radical but important choice very early on in my career to just be really open," he explained. "I have this opportunity to be open."

His openness created permission. When someone with credibility shares vulnerable personal experiences, it normalizes conversations we desperately need. But Ismail also acknowledged the absurdity: "We shouldn't all have to expose our deepest traumas to convince lawmakers that it's important to make these treatments or these modalities available."

The bar is set impossibly high. Families shouldn't have to perform their grief publicly to justify access to healing. Yet some people choose to heal out loud anyway, recognizing the power of visibility in breaking silence.

Ismail's family found a different way. But it required tremendous courage to even consider it.

She Would Be Horrified

Ismail's mother immigrated to the United States from Colombia in the mid-1980s, partly to escape the violence and instability created by the drug war. She built a life as a dentist, raised three sons, and became a pillar in her community. She died after years of cancer treatment when Ismail was in his 20s.

A year and a half later, family members suggested gathering for an ayahuasca ceremony to process the grief together. The medicine had been used for generations by indigenous people in the region where their family originated. It was ancestral medicine. But in some ways, it was also the kind of ‘drug’ his mother had fled Colombia to escape.

"The idea first emerged of potentially working with psychedelics, especially with something like ayahuasca," Ismail recalled, "Prior to that point, when this idea first came up, I was like, man, like she would be horrified."

He continued: "Just the idea itself was so offensive. I was like, oh my God, are we really? And that really emerged about a year and a half afterward."

The contradiction was stark. His mother had left Colombia partly because of drug-related violence. Now her family was considering using a plant medicine that society labeled as a ‘drug’. "In retrospect, it all balances out. Now, I believe that her spirit really saw the whole picture, even if what I remembered was her being really, really freaked out about anything that looked, smelled, felt remotely like a drug."

But grief creates space for reconsidering what healing might look like. The door opened by recognizing ayahuasca as ancestral medicine, not as a ‘drug’.

Three Generations Gather

The family came together: Ismail's grandmother, his mother's surviving sister, cousins, uncles. Three generations. And for almost all of them, this was their first experience with ayahuasca.

Think about that courage for a moment. Your wife, your sister, your daughter has just died. Someone suggests using a powerful plant medicine in a ceremonial context. You've never done this before. You don't fully understand what will happen. But you trust. You show up. You say yes to the unknown because you need healing and you trust the people suggesting this path.

Most family members weren't reading Erowid. They weren't psychonauts. They were simply trusting what was being offered. Trusting each other. Trusting ancestral wisdom. Trusting that this gathering might create space for healing.

Ismail acknowledges that most people don’t associate psychedelics with family gatherings. "I don't take for granted how much went into making something like this possible and how difficult it is for a lot of people to even imagine having an experience like that with a sibling, much less a parent," Ismail reflected. "I just wanted to acknowledge that because it's true and it's an immense blessing."

And here's what he emphasized about the ceremony itself: "In some way, the medicine and the experience that involves deepening in community, whether it's family or otherwise, is incidental to the container that gets created and the connections that are possible between people."

The ceremony was the container. The ayahuasca was the catalyst. The family was the medicine. 

The Work Continues

The family ceremony wasn't a one-time event that fixed everything. Ismail pointed out that the first gathering "started what has become every few years of getting back together."

The ongoing nature of this work matters. Psychedelics aren't magic bullets that eliminate grief. They're catalysts that reveal work needing attention. And that work continues. The family keeps gathering. Keeps tending to relationships. Keeps creating space for difficult conversations and necessary healing.

"It's not like you take [psychedelics’ and then the thing goes away," Ismail emphasized. "They reveal a lot and that cuts both ways. It has led to incredible beauty and depth and accelerations of relationships and things need to be tended."

This is the potential: families creating ongoing containers for collective healing rather than suffering in isolation. Not perfect resolution. Not elimination of grief. But families journeying together through the hardest experiences life offers.

And this is where MAPS's mission becomes tangible. For 40 years, MAPS has worked to create legal, safe access to psychedelic medicines through research, education and policy advocacy. That work isn't abstract. It's about making experiences like Ismail's family ceremony possible for more families affected by cancer.

Cancer detonates like a bomb through family systems. The explosion leaves everyone wounded. MAPS is building infrastructure so that families caught in that blast radius don't have to navigate healing alone or illegally. So that collective healing can become accessible to the millions of families shattered by cancer each year.

I'm grateful for MAPS's work on behalf of the cancer community and our families. Their decades of advocacy create pathways for the kind of healing that happens when families journey together rather than suffer alone. The work continues. The families gather. And slowly, together, we rebuild from the rubble.

Let's journey together.