In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

by Sebastian Junger

One of the core goals of life is survival; the other is meaning.

“Love means, stay here.”

random probability will never re-concentrate those molecules back into their original form.

You cannot visit a place of such violence and death and not expect it to follow you home, I thought; you cannot seek out another man’s suffering and not become part of it.

It’s an open question whether a full and unaverted look at death crushes the human psyche or liberates it.

The price of getting to love somebody is having to lose them, I wrote. The price of getting to live is having to die.

could be a dimension where time does not exist, and my father could be both alive and dead—and therefore able to visit me.

travel at the speed of light

That makes me want to tell them I didn’t mean to leave, and that there is a parallel reality—the one I think I’m in right now—where we are all still together.

many return to their paltry bodies on the battlefield or hospital gurney only with great reluctance and a kind of embarrassment. How can I pass up the truth for an illusion? How can I accept this lesser version of myself?