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.

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.

Like birth, dying has its own timetable and cannot be thwarted and so requires neither courage nor willingness, though both help enormously.

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 actually “consequence seekers.” Because death is the ultimate consequence, it’s the ultimate reality that gives us meaning.

A person can die in two or three minutes if a major artery is severed or can hang on for hours if the blood loss is slower, as it was for me.

Three percent of older Americans have aortic aneurysms that are at risk of rupture, and for those who experience a rupture, only about 10 percent make it to the hospital alive. Of those, almost half die in surgery.

lumen,

“You were getting ready to buy the farm.” (The term is thought to come from the families of dead soldiers, who used government death benefits to pay off property debt.)

He was not so much a vision as a mass of energy configured in a deeply familiar way as my father.

the Second Law of Thermodynamics, also known as entropy.

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.

She considered me for a moment. “Instead of thinking of it as something scary,” she said, “try thinking of it as something sacred.”

Eventually we will all behold the void. I was twenty and it was compelling because it was terrifying, and I was determined that it shouldn’t be.

One could say that it’s the small ambitions of life that shred our souls, and that if we’re lucky enough to glimpse the gargoyles of our final descent and make it back alive, we are truly saved. 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.

“life review” by researchers who study the subjective experience of dying.

between 12 and 18 percent had deep and affecting experiences on the threshold of life: meeting dead loved ones, being ushered through a tunnel of light, existing outside of their bodies, and being filled with love and bliss.

It is characterized by the conviction that you have sweeping knowledge of all things and can simultaneously reexperience your entire life.

experiencing universal consciousness.

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 survival rate for cardiac arrest is about 10 percent.

The dying often say that they reentered their bodies only because the living still needed them.

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

My father believed that when we die, our souls are subsumed back into the vast soulmatter of the universe like waves subsumed back into the sea.

he also never looked up at the stars because he said he found the immensity overwhelming.

There are many ways to die after a large blood transfusion, and a pulmonary crisis is one of the most common

People die regularly in the ICU from mundane things like pneumonia after surviving extraordinary things like car accidents, gunshot wounds, and falls from great heights.

this new part of my life was supposed to be called. The extra years that had been returned to me were too terrifying to be beautiful and too precious to be ordinary.

Eventually Barbara asked if I felt lucky or unlucky to have almost died and I didn’t know how to answer. Was I blessed by special knowledge or cursed by it?

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 first person to systematically document and popularize near-death experiences was a philosopher and doctor named Raymond Moody, whose book Life After Life

Bruce Greyson. His book After

In 1998, Dr. Greyson

Journal of Scientific Exploration.

gave credence to the idea that individual consciousness survives death.

You lose borders between yourself and others.

The rejoinder to the “dying brain” hypothesis is that people falling from great heights or about to have a car crash do not have low blood oxygen or high carbon dioxide levels, and yet they often have life reviews, visions, and other classic 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.

“The experience I had on ketamine was like a near-death experience, and it was terrifying,” one psychologist told me. “I felt like I was being pulled deeper and deeper into nothingness.

(Because the brain cannot feel pain, patients are kept conscious to report what they are experiencing.)

The world over, people believe in two realities: one we walk around in and the “other” that we go to from time to time. Drugs, dreams, religion, and death are the ways people are generally thought to cross over.

“Yes, there is. All you have to do is travel at the speed of light and time stops. A second becomes eons—but as perceived by somebody else. For you, a second is a second.”

Why do the dying—and only the dying—keep seeing the dead in their last days and hours?

So, abandoning likelihood for a moment, one might try out the idea that death is simply where the veil of belief gets rent to reveal a greater system beyond. “Reality” may just be a boundary we can’t see past.

what if there were some kind of post-death existence? What if the dead were not entirely gone, in the sense that we understand that word, and the living were not entirely bound by time and space?

When you stop observing it, you regain information about its momentum but lose its location. There was no way to have both. That paradox famously came to be known as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle

subatomic world was brought into existence by observation.

Theoretically, Schrödinger’s cat was a massive wave function—both alive and dead—until the box was opened, at which point its wave function collapsed into one outcome or the other.

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.

At that point, the universe theoretically measured one “Planck length”—the smallest possible distance of the subatomic world—and was infinitely hot and dense. This is referred to as the “singularity” and is as close as physicists come to talking about God.

At the theoretical singularity there was no time, no light, no space, no gravity, no mathematics, no laws of physics, and no constants; every value was infinite.