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

by Sebastian Junger

Not death on my terms—the jacked-up energy of a close call, the sick relief of a lucky break—but on its terms. The great gaping pit that has everything and nothing inside it, including your dead father. It’s not in a hurry because it doesn’t have to be; it’s just there. You’re the one in the hurry, rushing this way and that, and then suddenly the pit is swallowing you and the room and the world and all the light in it. I thought about that version of death for the first time. The version that isn’t a thing; the version that is absolutely nothing.

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

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. 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.