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

by Sebastian Junger

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.

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.

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.

Why would they need to do that?, I wondered. I already had IV lines in both arms. “You mean, in case there’s an emergency?” I asked. “This is the emergency,” Wilson said

I later asked Dr. Kohler what was going on with me, medically, at that point. He said, “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.)

I thought; you cannot seek out another man’s suffering and not become part of it. One day it will paint your ceiling and fill your mind and hijack your dreams. One day it will appear on hospital equipment above your head when there is nothing left to do but hope

Oh God, thy sea is so great and my boat is so small, as the prayer goes. 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?

*

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.

*

I lay down on the couch, but I couldn’t sleep, so I sat back up and wrote down what I was thinking. 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. Once I was blown up in a Humvee in Afghanistan and avoided injury because the bomb went off under the engine block instead of the crew compartment—a difference of about ten feet. I was jacked with adrenaline for the next few hours and then went careening into a depression that lasted days. I became paranoid about almost everything: where I sat, where I walked, what I sat behind. It was the ten feet that got me—the fact that “so much could be determined by so little,”

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.

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

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. But how is that even possible? Once in a bar in South Texas I saw a photograph of a Mexican rebel facing a firing squad. He stood in his old boots and peasant clothes with a cigar between his teeth and an expression of such calm superiority on his face that he made the men with the guns look like children. A day or an hour is just as precious to him as to us but we don’t know that yet. We will.

*

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.

The flip side of terror is reverence; if you’re not sufficiently reverent, you’re not sufficiently terrified, and vice versa. My appreciation for the current moment rose to such levels that it could almost be paralyzing. There was virtually no activity that couldn’t come grinding to a halt because I realized all over again how unlikely the whole thing was. Why wasn’t everyone crying all the time over this? I thought. Have you seen the trees—really seen them? Or the clouds? Or the way water droplets form digital patterns on the porch screen after it rains?

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.

If the force of gravity were even slightly weaker, stars wouldn’t be dense enough to cross the Coulomb barrier and start thermonuclear fusion. It would be a completely dark universe. If gravity were slightly stronger, stars would burn too hot and fast, and there would be no life. If the attractive force between electrons and atomic nuclei were too weak, electrons couldn’t orbit; if it were too strong, atoms couldn’t bond with each other. Either way, there would be no molecules. 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.

=

In the basest terms, death is a final spike in the entropy that all living creatures must fight in order to exist.

The cosmos does not go howling on forever, in other words; it is born, ages, and dies like we do. When people hope for eternal life, they are hoping for something that even the universe, fourteen billion years old and about ninety-three billion light years across, cannot be granted.

Food can be thought of as stored sunlight, and sunlight can be thought of as stored energy from the big bang.

Richard Feynman supposedly declared that if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.

Then, over the course of one day and one night, while on vacation at a seaside resort, Werner Heisenberg discovered matrix quantum mechanics. He was twenty-three years old. Heisenberg’s theory proposed that an electron is not a particle that exists at one place at one time the way a person or a chair does; rather, it occupies all positions at once as a statistical probability. When you pin it down by observing it with a detector, the electron freezes in place, and you lose all information about its momentum. 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 and forced physicists to come to the impossible conclusion that the subatomic world was brought into existence by observation. The act of observing something created the very thing that was being observed—which, until then, had existed only as a set of probabilities called a wave function.

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.

If you raise children without religion, you are raising children who will ask questions you cannot answer.

fleeting subatomic particle called the Higgs boson is responsible for the force of gravity and gives matter mass; perhaps a similar unknown particle is responsible for consciousness. It would pervade the universe the way gravity does and, like gravity, determine how everything works. Without it, nothing would exist; the universe would just be a massive wave function. Scientists are so far from explaining consciousness that they can’t even agree on a definition, yet it is the crowning achievement of the physical world and seems to be the reason that anything exists in the form that it does. The circularity is audacious: a mix of minerals organized as a human brain summon the world into existence by collapsing its wave function, giving physical reality to the very minerals the brain is made of.

has been well established that observing a double-slit experiment forces photons to act like particles rather than waves and go through one slit at a time, whereas unobserved photons go through both. And it has been well established that particles “entangled” at the quantum level affect each other instantaneously across any distance, including the entire universe.

The risk of human knowledge not only changes what will happen; it revises what did happen and produces a different outcome.

One might allow the quick thought that it is odd that so many religions, so many dying people, so many ecstatics, so many prophets, so many schizophrenics, so many shamans, and so many quantum physicists believe that death is not a final severing but an ultimate merging, and that the reality we take to be life is in fact a passing distraction from something so profound, so real, so all-encompassing, that many return to their paltry bodies on the battlefield or hospital gurney only with great reluctance and a kind of embarrassment.

The word apocalypse comes from the Greek, apokalupsis, to “uncover,” because all knowledge is said to be revealed in the final collapse. A last, terrifying, theory proposes that it is cosmically prohibited to have that knowledge beforehand because consciousness cannot survive a complete understanding of itself, and as physicists get closer to the final, apocalyptic truth, test results become more and more unreliable until, for example, entangled particles in Tenerife appear to reach back and fix outcomes for twinned particles in La Palma, and our credulity around such things is how the cosmos reaches back to trick us and fix a far greater outcome: that the ultimate truth must never be known, because once the knower understands that he is the entirety of all things, the universe becomes fatally self-referential and collapses back into a closed spacetime of zero radius with all values headed to zero and all history annihilated.

Then why do we know entaglement exists?