Todd Murchison, a grieving father, has been described as “a local physics geek and inventor/mad scientist.” As described by her family in her obituary, Mayah Anne Murchison (1999–2025) “was a fearless adventurer [who] sought out beauty, freedom, and wonder wherever she went, living with a spirit that was bold, curious, and unbound.”
BRATTLEBORO-This spring, I’m going to collect fungi, greens, and flowers of various sorts from around the grave where my 25-year-old daughter was buried the spring before. And test the plants for traces of her.
As I type this, it’s been nine months — 36 weeks — since Mayah took her own life on May 29, 2025. She was a week shy of her 26th birthday.
She was a hard-driven, curious, warm, happy, smart, and strong person. But in the last couple of years of her life, she had fallen into fentanyl and never managed to get back out.
She tried hard, more than once. I drove her a couple of times to the methadone clinic, where I saw the humiliating system and the effort it takes to endure it. She joined the people wanting to heal, who stand in the long lines in the cold of the Vermont winter, who give tests once inside, who are spoken to as if they are subhuman.
These people who are trying to quit opioids, the people trying to heal, are treated like dangerous criminals. Often, people end up going back to street drugs because they are experiencing post-traumatic stress from the “health” system itself. Once the old part of our brains get trained, habits are tough to break.
Mayah described the pain of withdrawal to me once as both freezing and burning at the same time, with overlapping feelings of suffocating and hyperventilating. Migraines build. You worry that you’re experiencing a heart attack.
You suffer from terrifying paranoia and alternating loss of hearing, smell, and sight, followed by oversensitivity. She described hot flashes, with bursts of extreme depression and anger in a random staccato she always felt lurking.
I’ve been addicted to alcohol, and it was hard and painful to stop. It was nothing like she described. It would also take me a day or so without alcohol before I’d start to feel withdrawal symptoms.
Those dependent on fentanyl start experiencing withdrawal after three to six hours, day or night, and they talk of “dope sickness” really getting hard to handle after eight hours. Which is incredible, and a big part of why it is such an incredibly dangerous drug.
* * *
Mayah was buried in a green burial, in a plain pine basket in the forest, in the woods at the farm where she grew up. Her body is becoming part of the local ecosystem. In my kitchen, watching flowers from her funeral begin to droop, I began thinking about the clear symbolism.
I realized I might be able to detect traces of her — to see her, in a way — within the plants growing around her grave.
I considered lots of options, from looking at gas emissions through the ground to temperature differences from the processes happening below. I’d have lots of excuses to design new tests, which I love, and to pull rarely used gear from shelves and put it to use.
But I caught myself.
I did not need, or want, to verify that we put Mayah into that hole. I didn’t want to see the dissolution of her old life. I wanted to see the new life she inspired.
I realized that, with near certainty, I could trace potassium-40 (K-40), a radioactive isotope that hitches a ride onto the kinds of potassium that all human life requires, but makes up a tiny 0.000001% of the good stuff. It accumulates all through our bodies.
I’d be able to “see” her in new flowers that grow near her. I could bring those flowers from her grave, knowing some of her is in them, and then watch them decay, which is both healthy and unhealthy for me to see.
Then, as I thought about how the mechanics and timing of her rippling out into the life around us, I realized I could hold onto some of that energy/matter. I could with certainty knock some of the K-40 atoms out of those plants and embed them into any other material — like a crystal for a necklace.
In a very green spot, life is all around. And this spring, when the snow is gone and the plants are waking up, my instinct is to just rush in and start gathering greens from above her grave, knowing some of her is in there.
But I’m going to be patient. I want to do it right, so I’ve been working on this for six months, preparing to start real testing in the spring.
Fairly weird? Yes, but it helps balance out the agony somehow.
Planning to do so carefully and critically puts me into a place where I am thinking of Mayah, but still functional. Maybe it is letting my left brain take on some of the load.
* * *
Mayah was raised on a beautiful Vermont farm, in a rural area, surrounded by close and extended family. And along with the farm’s horses, chickens, and pigs, I had a small physics/IT tech lab. So it was a diverse environment for a kid, and she grew into a true Renaissance woman, smart and very strong.
She traveled to see the world, often alone: backpacking solo across Equador, traveling to Turkey to work, explore, and much more. She had a kind of self-reliance and courage I never had that young.
Mayah loved bananas. She loved dark greens like kale, she loved Brazil nuts, she loved mushrooms. And those plants all love radioactive K-40. The plants don’t crave the radioactive part of it, but it comes with the package, and we all need potassium.
So K-40 gets to hitch a ride along with the part our bodies want. Though a good Geiger counter can detect its presence, you can’t easily sort its radiation out from background noise. However, I realized that another device, a scintillation counter, would better help me sort her K-40 signals from other radiation sources. (Watch out, they are all around you!)
* * *
In New England, a storm of opioids really started setting in around 2010, with prescription opioids lighting the fire. Then, as these painkillers became more difficult to acquire, heroin fed the next addictive wave. And then by 2016, 10 years ago, the heroin had become mostly fentanyl.
We were sitting ducks, innocently thinking stuff like heroin was something consigned to dark alleys in big cities. We saw plenty of alcohol and pot — sometimes mushrooms or some rare other things on the fringes. But heroin? We thought it was in a different reality.
So it quickly ate us alive: farm kids, people of all sorts in these little towns.
My daughter was among the young adults just starting out in the world who got quickly hooked. She got caught in this, getting a “hey, try this” someplace.
When I was younger, I went through times where I think I would have tried any drug. But prescription Oxy hadn’t planted the seeds in America yet, and fentanyl was unheard of.
* * *
What peeks can I get at bits of the universe that were part of Mayah?
I’ll first look at all the life around her gravesite, singling out similar plants growing in similar conditions of light, water, soil. Gathering, bagging, and marking samples from each plant. Taking photos and mapping where each sample is from.
And then, hopefully, I’ll find the patience to dry them. The less water in the samples, the more information I will get from their flowers and leaves.
In Mayah’s early teens, she loved playing in my lab, fascinated by complexity and experimental mystery. She had a natural talent for critical thinking that took me a decade longer to reach than it had her.
She would love what I am doing. She would find it wonderfully weird, slightly counterculture, and fascinating. She would have new ideas and angles.
I will start tests using the Schumann resonances. Harmonic radio signals like a river, which are flowing through and around you right now. There are a couple of hundred lightning strikes per second happening on Earth, and this incredible amount of energy creates sound we hear and sound we can’t.
Sound at one particular frequency, 7.83 Hz, just happens to reflect and bounce back and forth between parts of the atmosphere and set up a “ringing” around the whole planet. Some whales can hear and emit it. Some birds can navigate with it. But most of us don’t even have radios that can pick it up.
This main natural Shumann resonance is not a strong signal, but it is always present, and it constantly makes some tiny changes in the world.
I’ll shower the crystal with energy that has first traveled through the greens, mushrooms, and flowers. In first tests I will separately and in combination try three frequencies (A, B, and C) of ultraviolet light, wide frequencies of strong radio emissions, ultrasound, and various types of ionizing radiation.
But I think of making gifts for people, and I think of how tricky the word “radiation” is for folks. I’ll just use the much-less-scary sounding “whale song” range energy of the Schumann resonance.
This is one of the ways I’ve been dealing with her death. I also have bouts of agonizing pain that feel like they physically knock me back into a chair. Crying like I’ve never experienced. When alone, with no pride on the line, I’m letting it happen.
I know I have to let pain wash through me. But I’m also finding my left hemisphere is working through this differently, trying to make sense of it logically, to understand the physics of what has happened.
It is not a cold way of looking at it; my right brain still sends plenty of tears my way while I do it. But wanting to know that some of her is in the flower I am holding — that is another way of handling this change in reality.
The atoms of Mayah, the building blocks, have simply been rearranged. The First Law of Thermodynamics shows itself here: No part of her has been destroyed. She has simply changed form and has diffused. The bioelectrical patterns that were “her” — her thoughts and live body’s programming — are now mostly heat. Other parts of her have become parts of different materials and energy.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics holds. As matter/energy/information diffuses, everything seeks the easiest path. The settling of the universe, its decay, creates change. It’s why everything exists. It’s why we exist.
Moving some of Mayah into crystals sounds “new age.” But this is not mysterious magic, there is no idea of infusing “spirit” here, it is more a symbol to hold — a really tangible show of the cycle of death and regrowth, one that I can hold, look at, and think about.
I’m going to use mostly fluorite, a very pretty crystal type that will absorb such particles well and will let me make necklaces, carvings, and more.
* * *
I can’t ever know what was in Mayah’s mind in her last moments. This fits with a kind of loneliness we all share — we never really can really see things as somebody else does.
I never had harsh judgement about her choices in life; it was only in her last couple of years that the opioids really took choices from her.
In the years before, she had hopped trains with her sweet dog Cleo and traveled the country. I always wanted to see her world. She talked of the hidden meadows with little encampments, abandoned basements by beautiful rivers, sitting on top of a train going through the high Rockies, the farms around the country where they could trade a bit of work for food and lodging.
I was curious about her reality. I wanted to get to see those secret spots and meet people. I was disappointed for a bit that she didn’t jump at that chance to show me her surroundings. Now, I realize, who is going to haul their 50-year-old dad into all the secret hangout spots in town?
It never took work not to be judgmental of her choices; I just loved to watch and hear about whatever adventures she was having. I don’t know if my lack of judgment added to her problem; I did not understand how deeply opioids had taken hold of her. In the last two years of her life she became a ghost of herself.
It recently helped me to realize how little I knew of Mayah as an adult. She had been out in the world on her own for eight years. How much do our minds change between 10 and 18 years old? A lot. And the growth doesn’t stop, or even slow. We change as much just between 18 and 26 as we did the previous 10 years. I knew her as a child and then a young woman, and I got little time with her as a busy adult. Most of my last detailed memories of her are still as a happy and optimistic kid.
Mayah was living in the guest room of her grandparents’ house, at the farm where she grew up, when I last saw her. Before I drove back into town, she ran back out barefoot and gave me another sweet, long, big hug.
It was wonderful, but the vibe was just a bit off.
Now I think it might have been a goodbye hug.
* * *
I have pictures and memories of Mayah munching on veggies fresh from our gardens.
Some of those plants are still there, now becoming part of the life around her. The “cycle of life” talk regarding green burials is corny and cliché, but it is true.
We want to think that consciousness, life, and souls transcend our body’s death. That is a beautiful idea, and I hope such a thing is true.
But one thing I know is that the parts of Mayah are rippling out into the environment in the woods all around.
I am going to carve that piece of fluorite.
With that certainty, I will be thinking of her and have a new beautiful reminder of her in my pocket.
* * *
If you or someone you know is in crisis:
• Call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. The Lifeline provides free and confidential support to people in suicidal crisis or emotional distress 24 hours a day, seven days a week, across the United States.
• Call 911 in life-threatening situations.
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