You’ve probably heard of Sebastian Junger. He’s a filmmaker, journalist, and war correspondent, as well as the author of about a dozen books, including The Perfect Storm. A big deal, in other words. I heard him interviewed somewhere—on the CBC? on some podcast?—when In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face With the Idea of an Afterlife came out last year, and I bought a copy for my partner, who is interested in things like near-death experiences, and who read his earlier book, Freedom, a while ago. I didn’t expect to read it myself. But it’s short, and I want to read more in 2025, so its length was going to help me reach that goal. Plus whenever I saw the book’s front cover, the old blues song Bob Dylan covered on his first LP way back when would run through my head, an instant earworm. Maybe, I thought, if I read In My Time of Dying, I won’t have to keep playing that song on Spotify.

That plan didn’t work; I can hear Bob’s youthful whine running through my brain as I type these words. But In My Time of Dying is a fascinating read. In the summer of 2020, Junger was with his wife and family at their isolated rural home when he experienced a pancreatic aneurysm. A weak artery burst, and he very nearly bled to death. He’d been having abdominal pain for months, but nobody knew that was the cause—or that it would almost kill him. As the doctors scrambled to save his life, Junger saw his late father come out of a dark pit in the operating-room floor. “My father exuded reassurance and seemed to be inviting me to go with him,” Junger recalls. “‘It’s okay, there’s nothing to be scared of,’ he sseemed to be saying. ‘Don’t fight it. I’ll take care of you.’” Junger was confused by this apparition. He didn’t want to have anything to do with the dead or with his father’s “grotesque” invitation. “‘Doctor, you’ve got to hurry,’” he remembers telling his doctor. “‘You’re losing me. I’m going right now.’” 

In My Time of Dying tells the story of Junger’s miraculous recovery, the result of excellent medical care and sheer dumb luck. It wasn’t his first close call; in fact, I was surprised at how cavalierly he has treated his hold on life, risking it many times in search of a story or just taking foolish chances. Dudes do that, I guess. Maybe I’ve done the same in my own small, timid way. Junger’s memoir does more than just explain how he survived, though. It also explores what we know about such near-death experiences. Junger sifts through the literature on NDEs, as they’re called, thinking through the various explanations psychologists and other researchers offer for their existence. One possibility: as we are dying, n,n-dimethyltryptamine or DMT, a potent hallucinogen that’s produced endogenously in the brains of mammals, including ours, generates those experiences. Those who have used DMT report seeing bright lights and having a sensation of moving rapidly through space. The chemical protects cells from dying when there’s not enough oxygen or too much carbon dioxide, so its release in our last moments makes sense; our brain is trying to keep itself alive. But that’s not the only potential explanation; there are others, and Junger thinks carefully about them.

One of those possibilities is the idea that there’s an actual afterlife, that his father’s spirit literally appeared to Junger as he lay dying on that gurney. He explores (to the extent that anybody who isn’t a physicist can) quantum mechanics as a way of understanding the possibility, however remote, of an afterlife. Here Junger shows himself to be the son of his rationalistic scientist father and his mystical, New Agey mother. He doesn’t reach any firm conclusions, of course. How could he? Nobody knows what happens after we die, except the dead, and generally they don’t tell us much about their experience—except, perhaps, when they appear to us as we’re about to join them, something that’s surprisingly common.

The book ends with a story about Junger hiking with his father on a mountain in New Hampshire in late October when he was 16 or 17 years old. The older man begins to slide into hypothermia, and Junger keeps him going, feeding him hot soup until “he returned to being my father, and I returned to being his son.” They both survived. “I’m now much older than he was that night, and I finally understand how much my father must have trusted me on that trip, how much he must have loved me,” Junger tells us. “We’re all on the side of a mountain shocked by how fast it’s gotten dark; the only question is whether we’re with people we love or not. There is no other thing—no belief or religion or faith—there is just that. Just the knowledge that when we finally close our eyes, someone will be there to watch over us as we head out in to that great, soaring night.”

I really liked In My Time of Dying, although I know some folks might be put off by Junger’s hyper-masculine persona, and I intend to read some of his other books, starting, perhaps, with Freedom, which is on the bookshelves next to our bed. But probably not immediately. I’m not sure what I’m going to pick up next, but it’ll be by someone else, someone I haven’t just blogged about.