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

by Sebastian Junger

What amazed me was how malevolent the whole thing seemed—Me? Why do you want me? I was young and had no idea the world killed people so casually.

The existential charm of tree work is that your fate is entirely in your hands. The stakes are high—your life—but as with chess, there are no random events. All the information you need to survive is right in front of you, and if you don’t, it’s because you made a mistake. That is not true of driving or air travel or combat or even crossing the street on a walk light. Gravity, momentum, friction, and the dynamics of weight at the end of a line are all available to be understood and managed.

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—the car accident, the drowning, the cancer—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. It doesn’t, but it’s an odd quirk of neurology that when we are fighting the hardest to stay alive, we are hardly thinking about death at all. We’re too busy.

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 l...

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—and safer situations are usually not. A round of golf is pleasant (or not) but has very little meaning because almost nothing is at stake. In that context, adrenaline junkies are actually “meaning junkies,” and danger seekers are actuall...

But the randomness that can kill you will also save you.

One day when my youngest daughter was two, I told her that I loved her and asked if she knew what the word meant. “Yes, Daddy,” she said. “Love means, stay here.”

There is an irrefutable (and unprovable) thought experiment that when people drown, they construct an elaborate fantasy of their future to insulate themselves from what is actually happening. The subjective experience of time supposedly breaks down so that they enjoy this fantasy as if it were just a continuation of the life that came before.

Eventually, children start providing reassurance to their parents rather than the other way around,

My own father was born and raised in Europe but immigrated to the United States after the German Army invaded France, where he and his family were living. He was half Jewish on his father’s side, and though he rejected any kind of ethnic identity, he began using his Jewish middle name in America to flush out the bigots.

My father had never heard of MIT but did know about Harvard, which was his preferred choice. And he would have gone there except that—according to him—the admissions director said his test scores were so high that Harvard would let him in even though they’d “reached their quota of Jews.” My father nodded, walked out, and enrolled at MIT.

My father was a scientist who didn’t believe in anything that he couldn’t measure and test. (Which, as he’d point out, isn’t actually belief.)

For decades, radicals of all sorts—communists, artists, homosexuals, opium smokers—had come to the woods of Truro and the narrow laneways of Provincetown to avoid federal scrutiny and lead their subversive lives.

The human body has around ten pints of blood in it—or “units,” as doctors prefer. Women tend to have less blood than men and children have less blood than adults, but in all cases, a healthy person can lose around 15 percent of their blood without much effect. (Women commonly lose that much in childbirth.) At around 30 percent blood loss, though—three to four units—the body starts to go into compensatory shock to protect its vital organs. The heart rate increases to make up for low blood pressure, breathing gets faster and shallower, and capillaries and small blood vessels constrict to keep blood where it’s needed most, in the heart, lungs, and brain. If you push your fingertip into the skin of a healthy person, you will leave a white spot that refills with blood almost immediately. If you do the same to someone in compensatory shock, the white spot lingers, even if the person seems functional and clear-minded.

At 40 percent blood loss, the body starts to cross over into a state from which it cannot recover on its own. All organs need oxygen to function, including the heart, and if blood pressure drops too far, the heart can’t beat fast enough to maintain sufficient blood pressure for survival. At that point, the person goes from compensatory to hemorrhagic shock and actively starts dying. He or she may start shaking convulsively and slip in and out of consciousness. The person will be hallucinatory and delusional; in fact, they may have no idea they are dying. They may try to joke with the doctors or ask them why they look so worried. The brain, heart, and vital organs are not getting enough oxygen and are beginning to shut down, which accelerates a process of acid toxicity triggered by the initial shock of blood loss. Acidosis can kill people even though they received enough blood to keep their heart beating.

A person can die in two or three minutes if a major artery is severed or can hang on for hours if the blood l...

Forty percent blood loss could be likened to the “death zone” on Mount Everest, at 26,000 feet, where there is roughly one third the oxygen of sea level. Climbers stuck in the death zone have the same survival rate as people who lose half their blood outside the hospital, which is to say, zero.

Low blood oxygen from hemorrhage is indistinguishable from low blood oxygen from deep cold. The body starts expending huge amounts of metabolic energy trying to stay warm—burning the furniture because it’s out of firewood, as it were. In this case, the furniture is glucose, which is stored in the body’s cells. Burning glucose instead of oxygen is a desperate short-term measure because it produces lactic acid, which in turn impairs heart function. As heart function declines, the body gets less blood and sinks further into hypothermia, which lowers oxygen levels and clotting factors in the blood even more. Low clotting factors quickly culminate in coagulopathy, where the blood can’t clot at all. This feedback loop is known as the “trauma triad of death.”

Around one quarter of people who die of blood loss in the hospital have plenty of blood in their veins. They die of coagulopathy.

There generally isn’t time to test for blood compatibility when someone is bleeding out, so doctors will use the universal blood type, O negative, and hope for the best.

If my mother had really pushed—which she never did—he would probably have answered that believing things you don’t understand is either obedience or desperation, and neither leads to the truth. Would we believe in God if we didn’t die? Would we believe in energies if all illness was treatable?

Further out, intellectually, were the theoretical physicists. These men—they were virtually all men—had set out to pry the universe open through the sheer power of their intellects, and their new science proposed a theoretical entity, the atom, that all matter was composed of. Atoms can’t be seen directly because they are too small to reflect light, but their existence was the only explanation for things that could be seen. And smaller still were the subatomic particles that spun around atomic nuclei like planets orbiting a star. There was nothing smaller in existence and understanding them could be thought of as tantamount to understanding God.

Because quantum physics could be tested without being understood, it allowed humans to see how the universe worked without knowing why. At that point, physics was so abstract that it bordered on a kind of mysticism. For two hundred years, scientists trusted that the physical world could be understood because it could be measured, but in 1927, Werner Heisenberg demonstrated that subatomic particles changed behavior when observed. That led to staggering questions of whether matter—and reality—was ultimately even knowable. Schrödinger both clarified and deepened the issue by showing that electrons—the foundational unit of existence—were just a series of probabilities that only “collapsed” into one state when measured by humans.

Of the 131 known cases of true pancreatic aneurysms, around half were diagnosed at the hospital because the artery had already ruptured. Of those, one in four patients died on the table.

Biologically, I should have died six months into the fifty-ninth year of my life, but I didn’t. Dr. Dombrowski, Dr. Gorin, the hospital staff, and a gallery of odd and brilliant obsessives who pioneered things like blood transfusion and venous catheterization kept that from happening. I was in the first generation in history that could reliably be saved from abdominal hemorrhage.

Every object is a miracle compared to nothingness and every moment an infinity when correctly understood to be all we’ll ever get. Religion does its best to impart this through a lifetime of devotion, but one good look at death might be all you need.

When the American writer Herman Melville shipped out on a whale-hunting ship named the Acushnet in 1841, there was a black man aboard named John Backus who was famous for having once leapt out of a chase boat in panic. His fellow crew members had to suspend the hunt to save him. Acushnet means “peaceful resting place by the water” in Wampanoag, but in reality, each whale ship was its own brutal world. The industry killed men by the score, captains were often deranged sadists, and crew members would jump overboard at the first sight of land. Melville himself abandoned ship in the Marquesas Islands and was captured by cannibals, who held him for four months before giving him up to an Australian whaler. John Backus is thought to be the basis for a character named Pippin in Melville’s epic novel Moby-Dick. Pip, as he is called, is a young black man who serves as cabin boy on the fictional whaleship the Pequod. One day, Pip is pressed into service on a chase boat, but as soon as a whale has been harpooned, Pip panics and jumps overboard. The harpooner, a man named Stubb, is forced to cut the line—and lose the whale—so that Pip won’t die. He warns Pip, however, that next time he will choose the whale.

Some researchers point to similarities between so-called near-death experiences and religion as evidence of an afterlife, but it’s equally possible that religions have those traits precisely because that’s how people experience dying. For hundreds of thousands of years, presumably, people have returned from the twilight world of hemorrhagic shock and low blood oxygen to report meeting the dead, hovering over their own bodies, and experiencing universal consciousness. Those experiences could be entirely the result of neurochemical changes in the dying brain but still mistaken for actual trips into the afterlife. A worldwide belief in spirits could then develop that involved a special caste of shamans, priests, and sorcerers who ferried messages back and forth between the tiny, beautiful world of the living and the vast tracts of the dead.

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.

Military researchers have also produced similar memories and visions by accelerating fighter pilots to unconsciousness in human centrifuges. Gravity-induced loss of consciousness—G-LOC—starts to occur at accelerations of five times the force of gravity, and modern fighter planes can achieve almost twice that in less than a second. Under those conditions, a 200-pound man effectively weighs almost one ton. Losing consciousness while flying a fighter plane at twice the speed of sound is obviously catastrophic, and Air Force researchers have accelerated test pilots to unconsciousness more than a thousand times to determine the limits of human performance. “You cannot die without losing consciousness,” Dr. James Whinnery observed in a paper titled “Psychophysiologic Correlates of Unconsciousness and Near-Death Experiences.” Winnery goes on to write: “Everyone should, therefore, have some interest in loss of consciousness since he or she will experience it at least once.”

The reason pilots lose consciousness under high G-forces is that blood is forced into the abdomen and other flexible areas of the body, and the heart i...

Cardiac arrest does the same thing as G-LOC, but if circulation does not resume within minutes, brain cells start to die. First responders use “ambubags”—a mechanical substitute for mouth-to-mouth resuscitation—to force oxygen into the lungs, and chest compressions to force blood through the body. That keeps the brain irrigated with enough oxygenated blood to stave off cell death. At the hospital, doctors shock cardiac victims with a defibrillator, put them on a ventilator to help them breathe, inject them with adrenaline, and finally cut their chests open to try to massage their heart back to life. The survival rate for cardiac arrest is about 10 percent.

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

Finding yourself alive after almost dying is not, as it turns out, the kind of party one might expect. You realize that you weren’t returned to life, you were just introduced to death.

The arbitrariness of death would seem to mean life has very little value unless you flip the equation upside down and realize that any existence with guarantees can be taken for granted far too easily. In a sense, modern society has the worst of both: lives that can end in a moment because that has always been true, but the illusion of guaranteed continuity.

The word blessing is derived from the Anglo-Saxon word for blood—bledsian—and contains in its meaning the idea that there is no great blessing without sacrifice, and perhaps vice versa. The association may date to the ritual sacrifices of pre-Christian Europe as well as the hallowing of ground through combat. “We cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow this ground,” as Abraham Lincoln observed on the battlefields of Gettysburg in 1863. “The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.” The ultimate struggle, of course, is with God. In Genesis, Jacob wrestles a man by the banks of a stream not knowing that his adversary is God Himself. At daybreak, God wearies of the contest and unjoints Jacob’s hip by touching his thigh, but Jacob refuses to release him. “I will not let thee go except thou bless me,” Jacob says. God relents, and Jacob limps home blessed among men but crippled for life.

It’s very easy to prove you have cancer, it turns out, and almost impossible to prove you don’t.

Doctors came to seem like aloof priests who wielded fearsome power. Medical portals became thresholds to the great void. Do you want to know if you’re going to live or die? Just log onto the hospital website and find out. Everything you ever wanted to know is waiting for you there.

If the ultimate proof of God is existence itself—which many claim to be the case—then a true state of grace may mean dwelling so fully and completely in her present moment that you are still reading your books and singing your songs when the guards come for you at dawn. The past and the future have no tangible reality in our universe; God’s creation exists moment by moment or not at all, and our only chance at immortality might lie in experiencing each of those moments as the stunning extravagance they actually are.

A few days after coming home from the hospital in Hyannis, I was taking a shower when I realized that I finally had the answer to something I’d been wondering for years: What had Tim’s last minutes been like? The sky turned electric white, he shit his pants, and then he got sucked into a black pit, I thought. Once again, I’d survived something he hadn’t—another betrayal. Humans are pattern seekers, and now I had my pattern: When I live, someone else dies. Who was it going to be this time? My wife? My children? I leaned against the tile and cried until the shower ran cold.

Religious people understand life is a miracle, but you don’t need to sub it out to God to be rendered almost mute with wonder; just stand on a street corner and look around for a while.

And the truth is that by the time you’re actually dying, you’re probably not going from your full beautiful life straight to oblivion; you’re far more likely to be leaving a clutch of masked strangers speaking to each other in code while sticking tubes and needles into your body under very bright lights. Death is a huge distance to travel from a state of health and vigor, but if you’re actually dying—and I have a distinct memory of this—you are already so compromised that it can just feel like a half step to the left.

In every case cited by Greyson and his colleagues, the dying person found themselves outside their body and often looking down from above as doctors or bystanders tried to save them. Many also claimed to have perceptions that were not constrained by ordinary human perspectives.

Another recurring theme in many near-death experiences is encountering dead loved ones and other spirits. Not only have researchers documented this from around the world, but virtually every society believes that when you die, you will be reunited with loved ones who have already passed. This belief exists in the entire spectrum of human society, from small-band hunter-gatherers to mass industrialists, and forms a core part of almost all religions, including Christianity. In fact, to be Christian is to take the resurrection of Christ literally. From 1 Corinthians 15: “If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then… your faith is futile, and you are still in your sins.”

On the face of it, arguing there is no “afterlife” is not a particularly winning idea, so skeptics tend to publish research papers rather than bestselling books. These papers are written in dense medical language that seems intended for other scientists rather than the reading public, and the conclusions are always mild mannered but unequivocal: there is no rational reason to believe that NDEs are anything but hallucinations.

The brain is by far the most complex structure in the known universe, with an estimated hundred trillion neural connections, and those connections give rise to an extremely mysterious phenomenon called consciousness. Consciousness is still far beyond the capability of the largest computer networks but extremely vulnerable to distortion. Hallucinations, visions, disembodied voices, premonitions, and visions of God can feel extremely real but have no provable basis in reality.

Koch almost died and remembers an ecstatic experience with a brilliant light. “I lost everything. I lost my body, the world, my ego. There was no more Christof, there was just bright light, ecstasy. And it stays with you. Every day, I think about it. You lose borders between yourself and others. Right now, in normal conditions, I know this pen is not part of my body; I’ve learned there are borders between me and the rest of the world. So even if you make love to your wife and your bodies are intertwined, you still know, This is my leg and this is her leg. But under special circumstances, you can lose these borders and feel you are part of everything. Some people argue that this is evidence of universal consciousness. It’s quite possible. I think it’s unlikely, but I cannot rule it out on logical grounds.”

The Reynolds case is unique, though; far more common are NDEs where the brain keeps functioning even though the heart has stopped, and there is every reason to think that a person who survives that might have strange memories. Depriving the brain of oxygen is known to cause cognitive distortions, tunnel vision, loss of consciousness, and an accompanying phenomenon, the buildup of carbon dioxide in the blood stream, is thought to trigger release of a psychedelic compound called DMT (N,N-Dimethyltryptamine). The drug is chemically related to ayahuasca, the powerful “death vine” used by indigenous shamans in the Amazon basin, and it occurs naturally in spinal fluid. Endogenous DMT, as it is known, protects neurons from cell death during episodes of low oxygen or high carbon dioxide, which would make it a natural fit for near-death experiences.

One researcher compared first-person descriptions of hundreds of near-death experiences with fifteen thousand drug trips and found a very close match between NDEs and a synthetic drug called ketamine.