One night at Kaiser, after a delicate, shimmering jam that threaded out of "Estimated Prophet," Willie Green of the Neville Brothers joined the drummers onstage. Mickey Hart moved from the traps to the berimbau to the Beam, an instrument he helped invent: a ten-foot aluminum girder strung with piano wire tuned to extremely low pitches, designed to launch huge standing waves into very large rooms, to shiver bones and make the walls of a coliseum tremble. As the drummers faced one another, the tidal resonances of the Beam rippled through the floorboards, ebbing in a series of descending pitches that sounded then, to me, like the root of all music. I felt my knees weaken under me. My palms came together as if of their own volition, and I dropped to the floor. I didn't need to know or name what called me to make that full prostration. I only needed a place to do it that was safe, a place where I felt at liberty, so that inner life and outer life could come together. The root of the verb "to heal" means "to make whole." That's why the Grateful Dead were medicine men: the music, and the collective energy of Deadheads, together, helped heal the sickness of existence. To those blinded by habit was conveyed sight, and the lame were made - a little less lame. In Tibet , the medicine that healed the sickness of existence was called amrita, "the strongest poison and medicine of all." A black muddy river of amrita flowed through Grateful Dead land. Though from the outside, Garcia had an enviable life, he - like all of us - had to learn to make himself at home among many contradictions. (He once said, "I live in a world without a Grateful Dead.") An intensely humble and private man, his art earned him the kind of fame that plastered his face on bumper stickers. Branded for the duration of his career in the media by the decade in which he came of age, he sometimes seemed most at home picking the tunes of Bill Monroe, Doc Watson, and Clarence Ashley played for decades before anyone had heard of the Haight-Ashbury. For someone whose craft helped so many people rediscover the pleasures of having a body, Garcia seemed to only grudgingly acknowledge his own. And while Deadheads tapped a seemingly inexhaustible wellspring of good news in his music, Garcia himself had endured several of life's great tragedies, including witnessing the death of his father by drowning, and the loss of a finger. (The luminous tracks on American Beauty were recorded during a period of daily trips with his brother Tiff to San Francisco General, to visit their mother, Ruth, who had sustained injuries in a car accident that turned out to be fatal.) A witty and engaging conversationalist, of cosmopolitan interests and encyclopedic reference, Garcia must have realized that his social contacts were becoming increasingly circumscribed by his heroin habit, which he once referred to as a "buffer." Garcia had made of his instrument a means for direct expression of his soul. In the last year of his life - as his buffer became an adversary to his art, his nimbleness became a thing lost, and the lyrics no longer arrived - the pain was audible in his music. Last spring, when I asked a mutual friend how the sessions for the new album were going, he said that Jerry was uncommunicative, unkempt, and not playing well. I asked him if Garcia's behavior had any emotional coloration. "Yeah," he said - "Do Not Disturb." For the last year, I'd been reassuring panicky young Deadheads online that the rumors were suddenly everywhere - that the Summer Tour would be the Dead's last - were untrue. The venues for '96, I'd been told, had already been booked. But the mind at large knew better. The universe that set Garcia up as a medicine man in an age thirsting for mystery would not let him exit without the thunderclaps, lighting and palls of doom that Shakespeare brought down on the heads of a tattered kings and his clown. At four in the morning on August 9th , Maureen Hunter stirred sleepless beside her husband, Robert. Garcia had telephoned the Hunters a day or so earlier, to thank Robert for all the songs they'd written together, and also to say, with unusual explicitness, that he loved him. Maureen got up and walked into the kitchen where a breeze was blowing through an open window. She bolted the window, looked in on her daughter, and returned to bed. A few miles away, a staffer at Serenity Knolls paused outside Garcia's room, not hearing the snoring she'd heard earlier. He entered the room, and found Garcia in bed, his heart stopped, smiling.