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.

In My Time of Dying

Laura Mei

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 could never happen to us. It's an enormously helpful illusion. Some people take the illusion even further by deliberately taking risks, as if beating the odds over and over gives them a kind of agency. Dying is the most ordinary thing you will ever do but also the most radical. You will go from a living, conscious being, to dust. Nothing in your life can possibly prepare you for such a transition. Like birth, dying has its own timetable and cannot be thwarted, and so requires neither courage nor willingness — though both help enormously. Death annihilates us so completely that we might as well have not lived. But without death, the life we did live would be meaningless because it would never end. One of the core goals of life is survival, the other is meaning. In some ways they are antithetical; situations that have intense consequences are exceedingly meaningful: childbirth, combat, natural disasters, whereas safer situations are usually not. In that context, adrenaline junkies are actually meaning junkies and danger seekers are actually consequence seekers because death is the ultimate consequence. It's the ultimate reality that gives us meaning.

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