Sitting cross-legged in the upstairs gathering space of plantmagicdenver, a nexus of metro Denver’s psychedelic community, Travis Tyler Fluck, a psilocybin educator and psychedelic death doula, recalls his first heroic dose of shrooms back in August 2019: 7.6 grams of the extremely potent Penis Envy strain. “I took this giant dose to break through and just see what the other side was like,” Fluck says. “And the mushroom obliged me and gave me this vision, this very direct perception.” Earlier that spring, Fluck had been a leader in the successful citizens’ initiative to decriminalize psilocybin mushrooms in Denver, but his work with the natural medicine was about to take a tangent. Between his life-altering shroom trip and the arrival of the pandemic, the International End of Life Doula Association brought a training course to Denver, and Fluck signed up to become a death doula, “someone who provides companionship, comfort and guidance to those planning for death, diagnosed with a t...