Sebastian Junger’s “In My Time of Dying” reviewed

June 15, 2020, dawned for Junger like any other not-quite-summer day on Cape Cod. But a quiet storm was brewing inside the then 58-year-old writer. That morning, he was “woken from sleep by a dream in which my wife and daughters were sobbing and hugging each other while I was floating above their heads, unable to communicate with them.” He shouted at them, he waved at them. It didn’t matter. In his dream, he learned that he had died because, as a voice explained to him, “I had been careless.” He didn’t immediately connect that dream with the intermittent pains in his abdomen that he had been experiencing for more than nine months. He had ignored them as they came and went, but he remembers thinking at one point, “This is the kind of pain that makes you learn later that you’re going to die.”

The next morning he was awakened not by a dream but by pain that soon subsided. That afternoon he made an unusual suggestion to his wife that they visit a writing studio deep in their wooded property. In some of the most compelling prose of his career, Junger describes what happened next: “My abdomen seemed to consist only of pain and nothing else,” and suddenly he was teetering between life and death. “Halfway to the hospital, a spasm shot through me, lifting my body off the gurney. It felt as if I had been injected with hot lava. A few minutes later, I lost control of my bowels and a foul-smelling fluid left me, mostly blood.”

The final diagnosis: a ruptured aneurysm in a pancreatic artery that had caused a massive abdominal hemorrhage, with so much blood loss that Junger came dangerously close to death. As surgeons tried to save him, Junger felt the presence of his late father, who invited his son to follow him. “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he seemed to say. “Don’t fight it.”

A staunch atheist and believer in the scientific method, Junger had been raised by a physicist (his father) and a painter (his mother). His upbringing left little room for a spiritual experience such as this, which turns out to be the central enigma of this book and, I dare say, of his life. The encounter with his father was understandably unsettling. “He was dead, I was alive, and I wanted nothing to do with him.” But it is hard to forget what he had seen: his father had not only visited him, but had opened the door to the idea that there might actually be life after death.

Really? Show me the proof. Oh, you can’t. How can something be true if you can’t prove it? Ted Kaptchuk, a distinguished Harvard physician, once told a New Yorker writer that he had always “believed there was an important component of medicine involving suggestion, ritual and belief,” adding, “All ideas that make scientists scream.”

Junger’s experiences and the numerous reports he writes about near-death experiences (NDEs) could easily provoke an outcry in academic medicine.

I might have been one of those skeptics myself had I not had a life-changing near-death experience while recovering from an all-day cancer surgery. I once described it this way: “I was sliding through a tunnel toward a light. I kept resisting, but the light overwhelmed me until I finally agreed to let go. In those moments, before I heard the noise around me and the medical staff desperately (and successfully) pulled me back, I felt a sense of peace, even destiny.”

Medicine might attribute it to a lack of oxygen to the brain. But for me it was as real as it was ten years later when my grandmother – barely conscious – sat up in her hospital bed, reached for the covers and, as if recognizing someone, called out “Mother.” She died soon after.

Mere hallucinations? Maybe, maybe not. Junger cites the 1926 book “Death-bed Visions” by the British physicist William F. Barrett, which became a classic compendium of a phenomenon that many recognized but few understood. What is striking – then as now, he writes – is that “the reports are astonishingly consistent not only with each other but also with many reports from today.”

Ever the reporter, Junger is unwilling to dismiss these experiences as hallucinations (or any of the other medical explanations). He admits that he had hoped for evidence of an afterlife and found evidence of it in the universality of near-death experiences in which dead people are seen. After all, he writes, “there are neurochemical explanations for why people hallucinate, but not for why they hallucinate the same thing over and over again.”

Much earlier in his book, Junger writes: “(My mother) always asked why (my father) couldn’t just believe in something he didn’t understand, and I watched my father frown and think about that question as if it, too, might prove useful in some hyper-rational way.”

Can we prove there is life after death? No. Could there be? Junger gives us reason to believe in that possibility. Whatever the case, we are very lucky that Junger survived and that we can join him on another breathtaking adventure – this time to a place we will all visit one day.

How I was confronted with the idea of ​​life after death

Simon & Schuster. 176 pages. $27.99