One Last Medicine with My Father

A journey of addiction, faith, and finding home

There's a particular kind of silence that descends when your father tells you he's coming to die with you. Not the heavy silence of grief, though that's there too. But something deeper – the silence of realizing that sometimes our greatest teachers arrive disguised as our deepest wounds.

"Fathers should not die without their kids knowing their secrets," my father said over the phone from America. I was standing in our home, watching my newborn son sleep while my older boy played in the next room. Less than two years since I'd return back home wrapped in shame, abandoning my role as an urban shaman, running from a web of spiritual bypass and substance-aided awakening that had become too tangled to untangle.

"They found a forest in my lungs," he continued. Simple words carrying the weight of everything unsaid between us.

I looked around our apartment – empty beer bottles from last night's IPA session, the vape pen I used to quiet my racing thoughts, the micro-dose of LSD still humming in my system. Almost a year since my second son was born, and I was still caught in cycles of shame and substances, still trying to medicate the space between who I was and who I thought I should be.

But beneath these familiar patterns of escape, a darker question formed:

Did I kill my father?

Was it my running away that did this? The shame of his son the fallen shaman? The grief of watching me abandon everything we'd built together in America? I could see him chain-smoking while telling friends, "My son moved back to Israel," each cigarette planting another tree in that forest growing in his lungs.

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When he arrived, we had to wheel him from the plane. I'd never seen him so fragile – oxygen tank hissing quietly, shoulders curved inward like folding wings. This man who fought for custody of me as a child, who helped build my first business in his living room, who watched me rise and fall and rise again in America – now coming to die in my son's bedroom.

That first night, after getting him settled, I noticed something missing. "Are you taking your Rick Simpson oil (Cannabis Cancer Medication)?” I asked. The question felt important, though I wasn't sure why at first.

He shook his head no.

All my life, I'd watched this man seek expansion through cannabis, meditation, and Kabbalah, always reaching for something beyond the ordinary. Now, facing cancer, he'd stopped. Right when the medicine was finally "legal," finally justified, he'd chosen sobriety.

"Let's take some," I said, pulling out a syringe dense with dark oil. My hands shook slightly as I placed a drop on my finger, then his. This familiar ritual made sacred by context. Father and son, sharing medicine one last time.

Forty-five minutes passed in silence. The Mediterranean night wrapped around us like a prayer shawl. Finally, he turned to me, eyes clear and bright despite everything.

"I know there is a reality in which I'm healed."

His words landed like stones in still water, rippling out into infinite possibility. I leaned forward, suddenly urgent with hope.

"We could do this, Abba. We could put it all to the test – all your knowledge of Kabbalah, all our spiritual journeys together, all the ceremonies we've shared. We could finally prove God's healing mechanism. You could do the work, allow yourself to heal..."

My voice trailed off. I was aware of all the layers in my plea – the son wanting more time with his father, the shame-filled guide seeking redemption through someone else's healing, the little boy still watching the door while his parents chased God through a needle.

But my father just smiled, gentle and knowing.

He never touched cannabis again after that night.

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This is a preview of my upcoming memoir "High Priest," which traces my journey from ultra-orthodox Jewish boy to tech entrepreneur to urban shaman to whatever I'm becoming now.

High Priest a story about fathers and sons, about seeking God through every wrong door until we finally find the right one. It's about the secrets we keep and the ones that keep us. About coming home – not to some perfect version of ourselves, but to the raw, beautiful truth of who we've been all along.

This is one beat in a larger story I'm beginning to tell – part of what I call the 12 Beats of Remembering, a framework for understanding how we lose and find our faith, how we hide and seek and finally remember who we truly are.

But mostly, it's an invitation to look at your own story differently. To see how every wound carries medicine, how every loss contains a gift, how every ending teaches us something about beginnings.

My father chose to die awake. In doing so, he showed me what real faith looks like. Not the faith that chases miracles through substances or ceremonies, but the faith that faces life – and death – with clear eyes and an open heart.

Sometimes the greatest healing happens when we stop trying to heal.

Sometimes the deepest faith arrives when we stop trying to believe.

Sometimes the most profound medicine is simply the courage to be exactly who we are.

Love, Oriya

*If this resonates, I invite you to explore the 12 Beats of Remembering – a framework for transforming your own story of loss into a journey of remembering.

And stay tuned for more excerpts from "Love, Oriya" coming soon.*