In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife by Sebastian Junger
A near-fatal health emergency leads to this powerful reflection on death-and what might follow-by the bestselling author of Tribe and The Perfect Storm.
For years as an award-winning war reporter, Sebastian Junger traveled to many front lines and frequently put his life at risk. And yet the closest he ever came to death was the summer of 2020 while spending a quiet afternoon at the New England home he shared with his wife and two young children. Crippled by abdominal pain, Junger was rushed to the hospital by ambulance. Once there, he began slipping away. As blackness encroached, he was visited by his dead father, inviting Junger to join him. “It’s okay,” his father said. “There’s nothing to be scared of. I’ll take care of you.” That was the last thing Junger remembered until he came to the next day when he was told he had suffered a ruptured aneurysm that he should not have survived.
This experience spurred Junger-a confirmed atheist raised by his physicist father to respect the empirical-to undertake a scientific, philosophical, and deeply personal examination of mortality and what happens after we die. How do we begin to process the brutal fact that any of us might perish unexpectedly on what begins as an ordinary day? How do we grapple with phenomena that science may be unable to explain? And what happens to a person, emotionally and spiritually, when forced to reckon with such existential questions?
In My Time of Dying is part medical drama, part searing autobiography, and part rational inquiry into the ultimate unknowable mystery.
I saw this book at Barnes and Noble when I was with my friend. She read Junger's A Death in Belmont and said she liked that book.
It sparked my interest because I've been thinking a lot about the afterlife since my dad passed away 9 months ago. So I put the book on hold at the library.
Junger's experience sounds dark and scary. I've listened to other near death experiences (NDE) and to me his sounded like, well, hell. Which also didn't surprise me because he was an atheist.
This is a small snippet of his experience:
Page 37 - I was on the gurney, with Dr. Wilson upside down above my head and the other nurses and doctors seemingly all clustered on my right side. Meanwhile, there was nothing on my left side except the blackness that I was getting drawn into. 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 if 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 my 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 won't presume to know exactly what that was about, but it sounds sinister. (I use sinister on purpose since this was happening on the left side of his body.) Most of the NDEs I have heard about is that the person is in a beautiful, peaceful place and the soul doesn't want to leave but then a loved one says, "It's not your time. You have to go back."
There was also this that sounds unpleasant:
Page 65: I flashed a dim memory of the previous night as a cluster of strange and eager gargoyles waiting for me to give in.
If I were in his shoes I'd start praying the Rosary. I started including him in my prayers when I pray the Rosary. Sebastian Junger, if you happen to read this, start praying Rosary daily.
I thought he would have more of a religious awakening. Especially after he told a nurse that almost dying was terrifying and she told him, (page 67-68) "Instead of thinking of it as something scary," she said, "try thinking of it as something sacred." He also told Dr. Patrick Lamparello, a senior vascular surgeon at NYU Langone, "Plus, I'm tired of worrying I could die at any moment." To which Dr. Lamparello responded, "Have you considered religion?" (page 98.)
He does explore other NDEs and their commonalities, but he gets more into the possible scientific explanations. He goes into the science of dying and the neurochemical changes.
He also explores what his father would have thought of his NDE. Which leads into a deep dive of physics. That went way over my head. My eyes were spinning more than when I was listening to Aquinas's Shorter Summa.
He did lose me on the science technicalities but I did love reading about the philosophies of life and death from his own experiences and of others who experienced death or near death.
It seems that at the conclusion Junger comes away no longer an atheist but knowing that there is something after. Which sounds like a step in the right direction and I'll keep praying for him.
3 out of 5 Spirits.
Some memorable and poetic quotes:
Page 3 - It darkened as it came, advancing with the slow determination of something designed to kill you. (a wave when Junger was surfing in January.)
Page 6 - Everyone has a relationship with death whether they want one or not; refusing to think about death is its own kind of relationship. When we hear about another person's death, we are hearing a version of our own death as well, and the pity we feel is rooted in the hope that that kind of thing-the car accident, the drowning, the cancer-could never happen to us.
Page 30 - Doctors often try to get family members to come in if they think the patient will die, because seeing a trauma team desperately trying to save their loved one is enormously comforting later on.
Page 34-35 - Dr. Wilson asked permission to put a large-gauge line into my jugular vein, which sounded painful and unnecessary. Why would they need to do that?, I wondered. I already had IV lines in both arms. "You mean, in case there's an emergency?" I asked.
"This is the emergency," Wilson said and started readying something called a Cordis line, which is used during massive transfusions.
Page 95 - If the ultimate proof of God is existence itself-which many claim to be the case- then a true state of grace may mean dwelling so fully and completely in her present moment that you are still reading your books and singing your songs when the guards come for you at dawn.
Page 132 - The word awe has been defined as a mix of surprise and fear and is thought to have derived from an archaic English word for dread. And it was in exactly that root sense of the word that I began to react to the physics I was reading. I wanted to understand what my father was doing above me in the trauma bay, and eventually I wanted to understand his world and the way he thought. But the closer I got, the more I was filled with a kind of base terror. The secrets that physicists have been prying open made me feel like we were asking for trouble; like we were ungrateful and risking punishment. Is mystery a necessary element of the universe, like gravity, light, and electromagnetic force? Would God be angry if scientists fully explained Him? Could knowing everything result in everything being taken away?
Page 134 - (What ifs) Someone drives Barbara to the hospital to say good-by to my body and fill out the paperwork. My daughters grow up without a father. My mother goes to her grave after her firstborn. The world goes on. The universe does not notice.
Sometimes I have to grip my head with my hands and tell myself not to start down that path. Sometimes it takes an effort to believe that I didn't die, and that what I'm experiencing now is real.