Sunday, July 21, 2024
In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face To Face With The Idea Of An Afterlife
New York Times Book Review, Sebastian Junger Is Reporting Live From the Brink of Death (reviewing Sebastian Junger, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife (2024)):
Over the course of his reporting career, Sebastian Junger has had several close calls with death. ... In the introduction to his memoir, “In My Time of Dying,” ... he describes his own near-drowning while surfing — the shock of being shoved underwater as if by an invisible hand, the flashbulb memory of dirty dishes in his sink, the way the shadow of death suddenly eclipsed an ordinary day.
“I was young,” Junger writes, “and had no idea the world killed people so casually.”
On June 16, 2020, Junger found himself face-to-face with mortality in a way he’d never been. One minute he was enjoying quiet time with his wife at a remote cabin on Cape Cod in Massachusetts; the next, he was in excruciating pain from a ruptured aneurysm. Hours later, as a doctor inserted a large-gauge transfusion line into his jugular vein, Junger sensed his father’s presence in the room.
His father had been dead for eight years — and he’d been a scientist and a rationalist — but there he was, trying to comfort his son. It didn’t work.
Junger writes, “I became aware of a dark pit below me and to my left.” It was “the purest black and so infinitely deep that it had no real depth at all.” He was horrified, knowing that “if I went into that hole I was never coming back.”
Junger survived. Later, he had questions — lots of them. His memoir braids a journalist’s best efforts at answers with a sexagenarian’s complicated acceptance of the inevitable. ...
How would you describe your relationship with spirituality and religion?
I was raised to be skeptical of organized religion. So I just cruised through life without any particular thought of spirituality — and no particular need for it. I didn’t have a child, thank God, who died of cancer; nothing happened to me that was so unbearable that I had a need to reach out to a higher power. I was blessed. I’ve had a lucky life. Not easy, but lucky. ...
How did the experience change the way you think?
It never crossed my mind to start believing in God. But what did happen was I was like, maybe we don’t understand the universe on a fundamental level. Maybe we just don’t understand that this world we experience is just one reality and that there’s some reality we can’t understand that’s engaged when we die. All this stuff happens — ghosts and telepathy and the dead appearing in the rooms of the dying — that’s consistent in every culture in the world.
Maybe we just keep bumping into this thing that we’ll never understand because we’re basically a dog watching a television. Maybe anything’s possible; and clearly anything’s possible because the universe happened. If there’s ever an example of “anything can happen,” it’s the universe popping into existence from nothing.
I researched the science enough to understand legitimate explanations for neurological phenomena, and it left me with this question: But why all the same vision?
Other reviews of In My Time of Dying:
- National Review, Sebastian Junger’s Return from the Brink of Death
- Patheos, “In My Time Of Dying”
- Wall Street Journal, Sebastian Junger, Staying Alive
- Washington Post, Sebastian Junger Was a Skeptic of the Afterlife. Then He Nearly Died.
“Let me start this way: I believe that Sebastian Junger is one of the finest writers of our generation. In My Time of Dying is a stunning book about life, about death, about the afterlife. These are subjects all of us should want to spend days, months, years thinking about. But we don’t do that. Why? Probably because the subject overwhelms most of us. And maybe because the human condition scares the hell out of all of us. Well, Sebastian Junger has just done the hard work for us. In My Time of Dying examines the often subtle connections between life, death, and the after-life. Junger has clearly obsessed about his subject. The result is a powerful book that comes as close as anything I’ve read in explaining what it means to be human.”
—James Patterson
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