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

by Sebastian Junger

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.

He brought Enlightenment-era rationality to the benign superstitions of my mother, who adhered to a hopeful slew of Eastern wisdom: energies, chakras, past lives, and dead friends visiting in the form of owls or crows.

Your pulse is your life, the ultimate proof you’re animate and have something rare to lose. Everything alive has some kind of flux and ebb, and when that stops, life stops. When people say life is precious, they are saying that the rhythmic force that runs through all things—your wrist, your children’s wrists, God’s entire green earth—is precious. For my whole life, my pulse ran through me with such quiet power that I never had to think about it. And now they were having trouble finding it.

During the thirty seconds before and after death, the patient’s brain experienced a surge of gamma waves associated with memory retrieval, intense concentration, dissociative states, and dreaming. Laboratory rats experience the same surge of gamma waves when they die. The flood of memories experienced by Tyler Carroll as he drifted in and out of consciousness at a forward operating base in Afghanistan may be a trait common to all mammals, and the evolutionary advantage may simply lie in providing one last, compelling motivation to stay alive.

The extra years that had been returned to me were too terrifying to be beautiful and too precious to be ordinary.

There are more than thirty such parameters that must have almost the precise values that they do in order to permit a universe with life. The odds of that happening have been calculated to be ten to the negative 230—that is to say, one chance in a number that has 229 zeros after it. Randomly finding a specific grain of sand on the first try among all the grains on earth would be millions of millions of times more likely than the universe existing. And yet here we are.

We beseech you… do you not extinguish the light of Reason, do you not oust the sun from this world, do you not pull down your God from the sky, when attributing to him the impossible. Man is the creator of God, and God is a concept and creation of Man. God is not existent.

Eventually you will be all alone with doctors shrugging because they’ve run out of things to do, and the person you really are thumping frantically in your chest: the successes and catastrophes and affairs and hangovers and genuine loves and small betrayals and flashes of courage and the river of fear running beneath it all, and of course the vast stretches of wasted time that are part of even the most amazing life. You will know yourself best at that moment; you will be at your most real, your most honest, your most uncalculated. If you could travel back in time to make use of such knowledge during your life, you would become exactly the person you’d always hoped to be—but none of us do that. We don’t get that knowledge until it’s too late because then it can’t be tainted by vanity or pride or desire.

The word apocalypse comes from the Greek, apokalupsis, to “uncover,” because all knowledge is said to be revealed in the final collapse.

must have trusted me on that trip, how much he must have loved me. 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 into that great, soaring night.