In My Time of Dying
How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife
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A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
National Magazine Award winner Junger (Tribe) pieces together fragmented memories, accounts from his healthcare team and family, and scientific research for a mind-bending exploration of his own near-death experience. Stricken with severe abdominal pain in 2020, Junger was drifting in and out of consciousness in a hospital bed when his father, who had been dead for eight years, seemed to appear, "not so much floating as simply existing above me," and "invit me to go with him." After receiving treatment for a rare pancreatic aneurysm, and with a new awareness that "I was carrying my own destruction around... like a live hand grenade," Junger sought to understand what he'd experienced through the scientific method of inquiry used by his physicist father. Investigations of quantum mechanics, death as entropy, and matter as dependent on human consciousness are interwoven with eloquent philosophical musings that cut against popular notions of death. "The idea that you will appreciate life more after almost dying is a cheap bit of wisdom" from those "who have never been near death," Junger writes. Instead, one develops a paradoxical "appreciation of death... You will know yourself best at that moment; you will be at your most real." It's a riveting and resonant meditation on some of life's biggest questions.
