Sebastian Junger knows death.
Few contemporary writers can bring a reader into the bodies and minds of men as they are forced to confront their demise as masterfully as he can, whether it is six fishermen aboard the Andrea Gail in his 1997 book, A Perfect Storm, or a platoon of American soldiers on patrol in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, as recounted in War (2010). His skill in making us feel what happens to us as we die is unmatched. (His taut, tense account in A Perfect Storm of the physiological way a man drowns remains a mini–master class in ticktock writing.)
Yet, for all his expertise in reporting on death, and his talent in recounting it, Junger had never personally confronted it—until June 16, 2020. That was the day the then 58-year-old Junger, as he tells us now in his new book, In My Time of Dying, that, “biologically, I was supposed to die.”
He had spent the morning clearing underbrush along the dirt road leading to his house on Cape Cod. Later, he and his wife sat down on a bluff overlooking the bay, wanting to take a moment to enjoy what he later recalled was a perfect day. Suddenly, he was seized by an ungodly pain in his abdomen. An hour later, he was in the back of an ambulance, being raced on a 90-minute drive to the E.R. of Hyannis’s hospital, where doctors discovered he had bleeding internally and lost around two-thirds of his blood due to a ruptured pancreatic artery. He was quickly sliding towards death.
And here’s where Junger really grabs you by the scruff of your neck. As a physician scrambles to insert a critical catheter into the jugular vein of a still-conscious Junger, he tells us, “I became aware of a dark pit below me and to my left. The pit was the purest black and so infinitely deep that it had no real depth at all…. It exerted a pull that was slow but unanswerable, and I knew that if I went into the hole, I was never coming back…. And just when it seemed unavoidable, I became aware of something else: My [dead] father…. My father exuded reassurance and seemed to be inviting me to go with him.” It was the last thing Junger would remember until he woke up in the I.C.U.
Such a vision would rightly leave any of us transformed, and in the weeks after his life was saved (he later learned he had a 10 percent chance of survival by the time he was wheeled into the E.R.) Junger struggles to make sense of what happened. As he writes, finding yourself returned to life is “not quite the party you’d expect…. The extra years that had been returned to me were too terrifying to be beautiful, and too precious to be ordinary.” When his wife asks him if he felt lucky or unlucky to have almost died, he does not know how to answer.
But the gift, as it were, of Junger being made to gaze into that ghastly black void, while also being reassured by his father, is that his near-death experience (an “N.D.E.,” as it is known in medical circles) propels the reporter in him to try to find an explanation for what he saw and how it happened. Until that day, Junger was a man who did not believe in an afterlife. Now, driven by a desire to understand what his father was doing above him in that trauma bay, he takes us on his quest to answer the most fundamental mystery of life: Does our consciousness survive our death?
On the one hand, he says that there is no rational reason to believe N.D.E.’s are anything but “hallucinations.” Or that the flood of memories that come back to us as we die are actually an evolutionary advantage our brains have wired into us—our mind providing us with “one last, compelling motivation to stay alive.” And yet Junger the survivor finds himself unable to shake this thought: “What if there were some kind of post-death existence?,” leading him to ask the Big Question: “How would that possibly work?”
Death is the one voyage we all take alone. It is the most ordinary thing, and the most radical. And whether we want to think about it or not, we all have a relationship with death. On that June day, Junger’s relationship with death shifted entirely, and we are the fortunate ones. Written with Junger’s usual combination of intelligent reporting and flashes of poetry, this riveting, inspiring volume is an intimate and powerful work sure to prompt reflections in anyone who reads it.
Michael Hainey is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL and a co-host of its Morning Meeting podcast
