Everything alive has some kind of flux and ebb, and when that stops, life stops. When people say life is precious, they are saying that the rhythmic force that runs through all things — your wrist, your children’s wrists, God’s entire green earth — is precious. For my whole life, my pulse ran through me with such quiet power that I never had to think about it. And now they were having trouble finding it.
In 2020, at fifty-eight years old, best-selling author Sebastian Junger had a near-fatal health emergency (a ruptured aneurysm on a pancreatic artery; his odds of surviving, even with timely medical intervention, were around 10%), and while doctors at the Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis worked frantically to save his life, Junger had a profound near death experience that forced him to consider the possibility of an afterlife for the first time. In My Time of Dying is a perfectly balanced account of Junger’s experience: part memoir (including previous brushes with death, as a surfer and as an embedded war journalist in Afghanistan), part investigation into the nature of reality (from others’ accounts of NDEs to the latest revelations from quantum physics), and part personalised processing of his experience and consequent research, this is rich storytelling that nicely blends awe and reason. I must admit that this is exactly my kind of thing (it’s the 28th title on my “death and dying” shelf) but I think it is an objectively excellent read; highly recommended. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Wilson was still working on my neck, and I was feeling myself getting pulled more and more sternly into the darkness. And just when it seemed unavoidable, I became aware of something else: My father. He’d been dead eight years, but there he was, not so much floating as simply existing above me and slightly to my left. Everything that had to do with life was on the right side of my body and everything that had to do with this scary new place was on my left. My father exuded reassurance and seemed to be inviting me to go with him. “It’s okay, there’s nothing to be scared of,” he seemed to be saying. “Don’t fight it. I’ll take care of you.”
I enjoyed all of the biographical information (Junger was writing The Perfect Storm when he had his surfing accident; his great aunt Ithi had an affair with her algebra tutor, Erwin Schrödinger; Junger’s wife insisted he go to the hospital for his stomach pain, reminding the author of “the renowned statistic that married men live longer than unmarried men”), and we learn enough about Junger’s family and upbringing to understand that an encounter with the afterlife would be a shock in this group of atheists and scientists. Junger goes on to share all sides of the debate: stories from those who encountered the afterlife during near death experiences; perfectly rational explanations from scientists regarding brain activity at the time of death; and stories from others, like Junger himself, who understand and believe in the science but who nonetheless had profound NDEs that seemed to promise a continuation of the consciousness after death. And when Junger gets to the latest in quantum physics — explaining how unlikely the existence of the universe, and our place within it as sentient beings, really is — it’s easy to be persuaded to believe in something more.
Some interesting bits:
• “It doesn’t surprise me that you saw the dead. Not because I have strong beliefs about it, but because I have zero disbelief.”
• My worst fear — other than dying — was that because I’d come so close to death, it would now accompany me everywhere like some ghastly pet. Or, more accurately, that I was now the pet, and my new master was standing mutely with the lead watching me run out the clock.
• Finding yourself alive after almost dying is not, as it turns out, the kind of party one might expect. You realize that you weren’t returned to life, you were just introduced to death.
• Scientists are so far from explaining consciousness that they can’t even agree on a definition, yet it is the crowning achievement of the physical world and seems to be the reason that anything exists in the form that it does. The circularity is audacious: a mix of minerals organized as a human brain summon the world into existence by collapsing its wave function, giving physical reality to the very minerals the brain is made of.
• Our universe was created by unknowable forces, has no implicit reason to exist, and seems to violate its own basic laws. In such a world, what couldn’t happen? My dead father appearing above me in a trauma bay is the least of it. When I tried to find the ICU nurse who had suggested I try thinking of my experience as something sacred rather than something scary, no one at the hospital knew who she was; no one even knew what I was talking about. It crossed my mind that she did not exist. My experience was sacred, I finally decided, because I couldn’t really know life until I knew death, and I couldn’t really know death until it came for me.
Really well written and interesting throughout, full stars from me.
