Aldous Huxley’s Last Trip
Aldous Huxley on Death:
“A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.”
“On November 22, 1963, Aldous Huxley, bedridden and dying, requested on a writing tablet that his wife Laura give him a 100 microgram dose of LSD. As she went to get the drug from the medicine cabinet, Laura was perplexed to see the doctor and nurses watching TV. She gave him a second dose a few hours later, and by 5:20 p.m. he had died. Laura later learned that the TV had been showing coverage of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, who had been pronounced dead at 1:00 p.m. that day.” (Lapham’s Quarterly).
Huxley, though famed for his philosophical mysticism, spent the three years from his diagnosis of larynx cancer to death in a deep state of death denial. Huxley’s wife Laura meticulously detailed her husband’s dying process and recounted it vividly for his brother. In his final weeks, Huxley found increased mental vigor and though he was not able to consciously address his death, he began to do so subconsciously. In his final hours, Huxley experienced extreme agitation and restlessness to which there seemed to be no recourse, until he eventually made a written request asking for an intravenous dose of LSD. After administering the shot, Laura knelt by her husband’s ear and reminded him repeatedly for hours, comforting instructions for his final passage. “Easy, easy, and you are doing this willingly and consciously and beautifully – going forward and up, light and free, forward and up towards the light, into the light, into complete love,” she spoke into his ears in a trance like cadence.
Laura and Aldous. Photo Credit: LA Times
As she later confided in her letter, all who were present were struck by the serenity of his final passage, “These five people all said that this was the most serene, the most beautiful death. Both doctors and nurse said they had never seen a person in similar physical condition going off so completely without pain and without struggle.” Huxley’s death occurred on the same day that two other great men passed, John F. Kennedy and C.S. Lewis.
“Dying is almost the least spiritual of our acts, more strictly carnal even than the act of love. ”
