In My Time of Dying by Sebastian Junger
Award-winning journalist Sebastian Junger, famous for his gritty war correspondence, shifts his focus to his own medical crisis, vision of his dead father in the resulting near death experience, and the metaphysics that may explain it all in “In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face-to-Face with the Idea of an Afterlife”.
Written by Jade Adgate
I must admit a devoted fascination with the phenomena of Near Death Experiences (NDE’s), likely a remnant from my days study human consciousness and the philosophy of mind. It’s probably no surprise that in my years since (as a death doula), I have worked with precisely two people who approached the great doorway and turned back, and later shared their startlingly clear and hauntingly similar recollections. In both of these stories, my friend reported a pull into the great beyond, describing it as a vast darkness tugging softly at the edges of consciousness, a well of calm surrender. Also in both stories, my friend turned back and re-inhabited their body because the preoccupation with the attachments of their human consciousness (mostly family) exceeded the invitation of the great mystery they faced.
Celebrated journalist Sebastian Junger has been widely acclaimed for his depictions of war, receiving recognition for his unique voice, simultaneously raw and gently revealing. Junger manages to straddle the line between painting a vivid picture but without stomping on your heart in the process, something readers appreciate in the topics he focuses his reporting on: war, nature’s brutality and man’s, and now death or coming close to it. This may be the most profound offering of his newest book In My Time of Dying (released in May 2021), which stunts genre definition as part medical memoir, part scientific investigation, and part philosophical inquiry. Deftly blending these subjects with history, personal narrative, and metaphysics, dropping in linguistic lessons on words like “apocalypse” and “awe”, and voicing his poetic suspicions about the collective consciousness we may or may not call God, Junger writes a book unlike any that I have read before.
Sebastian Junger (Left) and Tim Heatherington (Right) at Outpost Restrepo. Photo by Outpost Films
“Everyone has a relationship with death whether they want one or not; refusing to think about death is its own kind of relationship,” begins Junger before launching into the story that serves as the foundation of this book. In his 50’s and father to two young daughters, a ruptured aneurysm in a pancreatic artery pushes Junger to the brink of his mortality and offers him glimpses of the great beyond. Told in a matter-of-fact tone and relying on later interviews with his operating physicians, Junger weaves his own hazy recollections (a tugging blackness to his left, his dead father hovering strangely above his body with a promise of faithful companionship, muted understanding of the physician’s nonverbal signals to one another over his heavily sedated body) with the biology that explains his situation in medical language we collectively trust (losing ten pints of blood, catheters run down the artery, embolisation). Raised by a consummate scientist father and a more mystical leaning mother, Junger seeks his own explanation for his near death experience in the philosophies that undergird both. Though ultimately, Junger and his reader as a byproduct, are blessed with more questions than answers.
“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.”
My favorite parts of this book naturally follow from the author’s experience as a journalist: I particularly enjoy the way Junger simply clarifies some of the most complex ideas of human existence (like quantum physics and the great philosopher’s ideas of consciousness) and I appreciate the poetic existentialism that Junger articulates.
“It’s an open question whether a full and unasserted look at death crushes the human psyche or liberates it…Every object is a miracle compared to nothingness and every moment an infinity when correctly understood to be all we’ll ever get” (Page 74).
Among many other topics, the questions that Junger posits that most spark my curiosity are whether facing death fundamentally changes a human (Herman Melville’s character Pippin in Moby-Dick), the emerging studies pointing to 12-15% of cardiac arrest survivors reporting similar NDE’s of meeting dead loved ones, tunnels of light, and life review, new studies demonstrating the human brain’s surge of gamma waves in the thirty seconds before and after death, and the quantum physics recently proposed that the universe seems to rewrite itself retroactively in “delayed-choice quantum erasure”.
“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.”
In all its complex questions, I found myself completely captivated with this short, intriguing, illuminating book. But the one idea that settles into my core as not a question but a nugget of profound truth, hard-earned from a man who stared into the vast mystery of death is the idea that death may be not something scary but something sacred. As Junger lay in his gurney recovering from the trauma of the previous night and it’s wavering approach of the great beyond, he says to his attending nurse", “I can’t believe I almost died last night. It’s terrifying.” Her answer here tidily sums up the work that we death doulas offer to our clients in their versions of this eventual home going. “Instead of thinking of it as something scary, try thinking of it as something sacred.” Later, as he is interviewing the medical professionals responsible for his care and survival, this particular nurse cannot be found, another great mystery in a book chockfull of invitations to dive into and maybe celebrate, the greatest mystery of all. If nothing else summoned an answer, this wisdom imparts a grace we are all well-served to treasure as we move through life and approach death ourselves: what if we think of death not as something scary but something sacred?
You can purchase your own copy of Sebastian Junger’s In My Time of Dying at Farewell Library’s bookshop, found here. To receive alerts to new reviews by Jade, sign up below.
