One of Sebastian Junger’s first jobs involved cutting down enormous trees deep in the forest at great heights with a chainsaw. It was only the beginning of his daredevil ways. Junger soon became a journalist with a penchant for putting himself in life-threatening positions. He reported on genocide from war-torn Kosovo. He traveled to Nigeria to write about militants wreaking havoc on oil production facilities there. He penned a book on the perils of deep-sea Atlantic fishing, then embedded himself for a year with infantry soldiers in combat in Afghanistan. He’s been called a writer with a nose for trouble.
Despite having taken up such dangerous subjects in the past, Junger’s newest book In My Time of Dying is probably his most harrowing. In the summer of 2020, he left New York City with his family due to Covid, settling in rural Massachusetts. One afternoon in June, Junger and his wife left their young children with a babysitter and walked deep into the woods to a small cabin he used for writing. However, not long after reaching the remote cabin, Sebastian felt an acute pain in his gut. An undiagnosed aneurysm had ruptured his pancreatic artery. His wife heroically managed to get him back home where the babysitter was barely able to get sufficient cell service to call 911. By the time the ambulance arrived, Sebastian’s blood pressure had crashed. His body in shock, blinded, he was barely hanging on.
“It took an hour and a half to get to the hospital,” Junger said in a recent interview. “My vital signs were…incompatible with life…(but) I was still half-conscious.” As the ER doctors worked on him, Junger suddenly sensed a black hole opening up to his left just below him. “Doc,” he said, “you’re losing me.” Then, he looked up to the right and saw his father had arrived to comfort him, which wouldn’t have been terribly surprising but for the fact that his dad had been dead for eight years. “I was puzzled by all this,” Junger understated.
Against all odds, Sebastian awoke in the ICU the next morning. A nurse told him, “We thought we’d lost you. No one survives this.” He had lost 90% of his blood to internal hemorrhage.
Embarking on a long road of recovery, Junger was awed by his survival and haunted by his near-death experience. In My Time of Dying is his attempt to come to grips with all that had happened.
There are so many reports of Near Death Experiences (NDEs) similar to Junger’s that scientists have embarked on rigorous research efforts to neurologically explain their commonality. However, thus far, while we generally know what happens to us from a neuro-chemical standpoint as we begin to die, science has still not unlocked why it is that those who survive nearly dying so often report encountering dead relatives or friends. Other common NDEs include descriptions of the dark pit that Junger saw, a sense of being drawn through a tunnel toward a shining light, or a quick movie-like review of one’s life. Others recount dispassionately floating above the operating room in a disembodied way, an overwhelming feeling of beauty and bliss, a universal knowledge, or the presence of all-encompassing love.
Junger’s book reviews possible neurological explanations for NDEs but also explores the tenets of a belief in the afterlife embraced by many of the world’s religions. He even touches on speculations about NDEs offered by those who study quantum physics.
Like Sebastian Junger, I wish we had a more exhaustive answer about what precisely happens the moment we die. But what I found most poignant about his book was his recollection of the back and forth he had with his nurse on the morning he awoke. When she informed him about how close he had come to death, Junger—who fears almost nothing—told her that just thinking about how close he came to leaving this world and his family terrified him. “Maybe,” the nurse replied, “don’t think of it as scary, but as sacred.”
Though Junger reports that he remains an atheist, it’s clear he has held on to the nurse’s words about the sacredness of life and has struggled, in good faith, with the implications of his Near Death Experience. Perhaps what might eventually cascade from it for him is the conclusion that as sacred as this life is, and as sacred as it feels in our clearest moments, this very sacredness is indeed just a pointer, a sign, a foretaste, of the eternally beautiful and blissful that’s yet come.
Creator God—Thank you for life’s undeniable sacred nature and all that this suggests about the edge of life, and beyond. Amen.
