In My Time of Dying (Sebastian Junger)
OVERVIEW
“Everyone has a relationship with death whether they want to or not; refusing to think about death is its own kind of relationship.”
In My Time of Dying chronicles Sebastian Junger’s near-death experience (NDE), which is especially interesting to me because Junger is an atheist (he was before the experience, and he remains so after). Junger has had plenty of brushes with death – almost drowning during a winter surf, almost dying in combat – but it’s a pancreatic aneurysm that comes closest to killing him. While hemorrhaging out in the ER, Junger sees his dead father… what experts call a “deathbed vision.” Junger also describes feeling a pull toward a growing blackness below and beside him. He survives the encounter, but only narrowly. While recovering, he reflects on his luckiness. If his wife hadn’t insisted on an ambulance, if he had been alone, if the aneurysm had ruptured at 3am instead of 3pm, if his pancreatic arteries had been arranged slightly differently… he would have died. The contrast floors him. The thin line between alive and not alive. How casually the world (and your own body) can kill you. But while a brush with death might inspire gratitude for life, in Junger it also unearths a kind of existential panic. He reflects that “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.” “It’s an open question whether a full and unaverted look at death crushes the human psyche or liberates it.” He calls the extra years of his life now returned to him “too terrifying to be beautiful and too precious to be ordinary.” That’s my favourite part of this memoir, the contemplation of whether mortality salience crushes or liberates you (I think his conclusion would be that it can easily do both).
Junger also explores the science of NDEs. Common experiences include finding yourself outside of your body (the classic out-of-body experience), tunneling vision, “life reviews,” feelings of peace, and feelings of cosmic unity/universal love. As it turns out, these same experiences can be induced in hypoxic (low oxygen) and psychedelic states. What restricted oxygen levels and psychedelic trips don’t seem to produce, however, are encounters with dead loved ones, which happen in approximately 1 in 4 NDEs. Seeing dead people and spirits seems to be unique to the NDE, and we don’t yet have a good explanation for why. Junger doesn’t offer any predictions, he’s simply content with “the knowledge that when we finally close our eyes, someone will be there to watch over us as we head out into that great, soaring night.”
IN SUM:
Is this book entirely secular? No.
If I had to describe the book in one sentence? Mortal contemplations from the foxhole (which is now unofficially the title of any memoir I’m able to write from my deathbed).
Who should read this book? Atheists interested in NDEs.