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

by Sebastian Junger

Everyone has a relationship with death whether they want one or not; refusing to think about death is its own kind of relationship.

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.”

My father loved my mother with a childlike devotion, and my mother loved him back with a kind of maternal exasperation. She would ask why he couldn’t just believe in something he didn’t understand, and I would watch my father frown and ponder that question as if it, too, might prove useful in some hyper-rational way. 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?

I have the feeling that whatever I choose, I will make that same choice for the rest of my life. If I gamble everything to find out what I don’t know, then I will always do that. If I turn back, I will always turn back. Is the unknown a place of mystery or terror? Am I sufficient unto myself or eternally indentured to my origins?

And as the evening sky paled and then turned orange and blue and the harbor lights came on outside my window, I found I couldn’t avoid memories of death itself. I’d beheld it. Felt it. Started to become it. My worst fear—other than dying—was that because I’d come so close to death, it would now accompany me everywhere like some ghastly pet. Or, more accurately, I was now the pet, and my new master was standing mutely with the lead watching me run out the clock.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The idea that physical existence has no other enduring dimension might one day seem as incomprehensible as the earth being flat or could wind up being the most fundamental of all the physical laws that we understand.

The overwhelming likelihood is that our sense of another reality is just a comforting illusion that helps us live our lives. But what appears to be likely or unlikely is a terrible strategy for finding out what is true. Our understanding of reality might be as limited as a dog’s understanding of television.

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.

Followed to its logical conclusion, the Planck constant meant that the laws of physics governing the macroscopic world—planets, pool balls, pendulums—fail at the subatomic level. A different set of laws take over that seem to defy not only common sense but everything that was previously known.

I survived my aneurysm because scientists very much like my father developed nearly miraculous procedures for keeping people alive. And then he appeared above me at the worst—and almost the last—moment of my life in a form that he and every man at the Quiet Torpedo Meeting would surely have dismissed as a hallucination. Now I find myself reading papers on quantum theory and cosmology, trying to understand what I saw; trying to understand why he was there. He appeared

when I needed him most. It was quite possibly his greatest act of love toward me. He was a distracted and distant father, a germophobe who hesitated to pick up his own children and could disappear into his thoughts for hours at a time—and yet there he was. It’s okay, you don’t have to fight it. I’ll take care of you. You can come with me.

We assume that life is the most real thing we will ever experience, but it might turn out to be the least real, the least meaningful.

The secrets that physicists have been prying open made me feel like we were asking for trouble; like we were ungrateful and risking punishment. Is mystery a necessary element of the universe, like gravity, light, and electromagnetic force? Would God be angry if scientists fully explained Him? Could knowing everything result in everything being taken away?

My experience was sacred, I finally decided, because I couldn’t really know life until I knew death, and I couldn’t really know death until it came for me. Without death, life does not require focus or courage or choice. Without death, life is just an extraordinary stunt that won’t stop.

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.