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

by Sebastian Junger

The wave wanted me and was going to keep thrashing me in the darkness until I finally gave up and breathed in. 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. Oddly, I remembered that there was a pile of dirty dishes in my sink that someone was going to have to deal with. Files and notes for a book I hoped to write on my desk. Work clothes scattered across the floor. My parents lived a hundred miles away, and I was essentially camping out in their summer house to write my book.

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

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 few weeks after getting home from London, I found myself inhabiting a very different world from the one I’d left—dull, monochromatic, without much optimism or love. Against all logic I convinced myself that Tim’s death was my fault and that it should have been me and not him. Some days, I even caught myself thinking that he was the lucky one to have died; I was going to have to see my life through to the very end.

My first marriage ended. My father died. The best man at my wedding rented a car, drove to a sporting goods store, bought a shotgun, and ended his life in a parking lot. But the randomness that can kill you will also save you.

I was wrenched from sleep by a dream of my wife and daughters sobbing and holding each other while I hovered oddly over their heads, unable to communicate with them. I screamed and waved, but they had no idea I was there. I was somehow made to understand that I’d died and couldn’t comfort them because I’d already crossed over; they were forever beyond my reach. Not only that, but I’d died because I hadn’t taken my life seriously. “You could have been doing anything—even playing chess—but instead you chose to die,” was how a voice explained it to me. I’d been careless, and now it was too late.

I hadn’t crossed over after all; I was still in bed with my family. I slid my arm under Xana, who rolled toward me instinctively in her sleep and put her head on my shoulder. I felt the interstellar emptiness of death slowly getting replaced by human warmth and touch.

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, Miguel, arrived at the port of Baltimore at age eighteen on a Portuguese cork freighter named the São Tomé.

My father said that he wanted to be a physicist, to which the official said, “Well then, you must go to MIT, in Boston. My son is there, and it’s the best school in the country.” 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.

When Dr. Kohler rushed into the trauma bay and was told I had abdominal pain, low blood pressure, pallor, and had been in and out of consciousness, he knew that a massive abdominal hemorrhage was one of the few things that checked all those boxes. Maybe I had a bleeding ulcer, maybe I had a ruptured aorta, maybe I had a tumor that had finally eaten through an artery wall, but the first thing they had to do was find the bleed and stop it. If I’d been shot or stabbed, they would have known where to start looking, but internal hemorrhage can be almost anywhere, which makes it particularly deadly.

I heard Dr. Kohler tell a nurse to take me to radiology “as fast as possible without actually running,” and then hallways started going by and double doors started opening. By then I’d fully transitioned to end-stage hemorrhagic shock and my body was shaking convulsively on the gurney, its last attempt to stay alive.

I was very cold and in extraordinary pain. A nurse put a heated blanket on my body, which felt incredible, and led me through some breathing exercises. I remember thinking that these must be the breathing exercises that women use during childbirth, and I was amazed how well they worked. I was not sedated because my vital signs were already catastrophically low; suppressing them further with pain medication could kill me.

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.” You can dump as much blood as you want into a person, but once the coagulopathy cascade has begun, it’s hard to stop. Ironically, the more saline you give a person before giving them actual blood, the more you dilute the clotting factors and the more danger they are in. Had Joe given me another IV bag in the ambulance, as I’d asked, my odds of entering the trauma triad of death would have gone up to 40 percent.

While radiology was trying to pinpoint the source of the bleeding, Dr. Kohler called a “code crimson,” which mobilized the blood assets in the hospital and diverted enough staff to administer them. It was the first time the summer interns had heard that call. I initially received nine units of blood in total, which meant I’d probably lost two thirds of the blood in my body. Blood was the only thing that could save my life, but the more units you need, the more likely you are to die, and nine units was getting close to the upper end of the scale.

On some level I knew something was seriously wrong, but my brain wasn’t working well enough to understand that I was dying. I didn’t have any grand thoughts about mortality or life; I didn’t even think about my family. I had all the introspection of a gut-shot coyote. Dr. Wilson reappeared above me upside down and put a transparent plastic sheet over my face to keep the area sterile.

During disasters such as earthquakes or terror attacks, blood supplies run out and doctors are forced to make decisions about who is likely to survive and who isn’t. The death rate for the kind of hemorrhage I had is 50 percent to 70 percent. During a mass casualty event with limited blood resources, I might just be sedated and allowed to die.

I didn’t understand why Dr. Wilson was taking so long to finish his work. “Doctor, you got to hurry,” I told him. “You’re losing me. I’m going right now.” And that was the last thing I remembered for a very long time.

In my mother’s world, people got sick because of negative energy in their body, and they got better when positive energy rid their body of toxins. Energy was an all-purpose metaphor that explained everything from bad relationships to cancer. At such proclamations, my father would turn his head toward my mother, his blue eyes sweeping the room like a benevolent lighthouse. “What kind of energy would that be?” he would ask. “Is it measurable?” My father loved my mother with a childlike devotion, and my mother loved him back with a kind of maternal exasperation.

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?

A wave function is a mathematical description of all possible values for an electron—including existence and nonexistence—and is represented by the Greek letter psi. If a cat could be both there and not there, so could a whole universe, some physicists observed, and there was no way to prove otherwise.

Ithi’s older sister, Adrienne, married a Spanish-Russian journalist named Jose Chapiro and moved to Dresden, where she gave birth to a boy named Miguel. Almost forty years later, in 1962, that little boy become my father. He lived his entire adult life in Boston and died holding my hand at home at age eighty-nine. Eight years later, in 2020, Miguel Junger appeared in a trauma bay in Hyannis, Massachusetts, statistically smeared like Schrödinger’s cat between a state of being and nonbeing, inviting me to join him in the beyond.

The rupture was in one of the small arteries—an arcade, as it’s called—that supplies blood to the pancreas and duodenum. Had the rupture been in a large abdominal artery, like the aorta, they would have found it a lot faster, but I’d already be dead. Smaller arteries bleed more slowly but are harder to find. My memories from this time are vague and disjointed, as if I had been allowed to see single frames of a very scary movie.

“I am going to kill you.” Whatever happens, stay standing, I thought; do not let your knees buckle. The man stared at me and then walked off. We waited and smoked cigarettes and watched the men for the slightest sign they might warm up to us or at least decide we weren’t a threat. MEND was disrupting the global oil supply by storming offshore platforms and blowing up pipelines, and they assumed it was only a matter of time before the Americans came after them. And then Mike and I showed up. After a while Jomo called back and told his men to let us go. My name had checked out with his Ijaw friends in New York, whatever that meant.

Weeks later, in New York, I opened my eyes to see my entire bedroom ceiling covered in Ijaw war paint. I lay there staring and paralyzed until the vision receded. You cannot visit a place of such violence and death and not expect it to follow you home, 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 Egbesu hasn’t decided you were lying the entire time.

I lay there thinking about death for the first time in my life. 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.

The nurse who had told me I’d almost died came back for a visit about an hour later. She was middle-aged and gave the impression of being compassionate but also very businesslike, as if dying was not a particularly big deal and you might not want to be overly dramatic about it. She asked how I was doing. “I’m okay,” I lied. “But I can’t believe I almost died last night. It’s terrifying.” She considered me for a moment. “Instead of thinking of it as something scary,” she said, “try thinking of it as something sacred.”

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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle says that every state—even nothingness—must include random change, which necessitates that quantum nothingness will occasionally become quantum somethingness.

“The universe itself could result from less than one milligram of matter compressed to a size billions of times smaller than an electron,” writes Linde. “One may consider our part of the universe as an extremely long-lived quantum fluctuation… Is it not possible that consciousness, like space-time, has its own intrinsic freedom and that neglecting these will lead to a description of the universe that is fundamentally incomplete?” One theory holds that consciousness is part of the physical world, like gravity, and participated in the original creation of the universe.

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.

If you want to solve the mind-body problem, you can take the physical as a given and explain the genesis of the conscious experience, or take conscious experience as a given and explain the genesis of the physical.” But you can’t do both.

There is a theory that at every moment, all possibilities in our lives are followed, and that an almost infinite multiplicity of universes extends out from each of us eternally. (The one thing the universe has plenty of is space-time, and presumably there would be no problem accommodating such extravagance.)

Another theory of reality is “Leibniz’s fearful doctrine of monads,” as Schrödinger put it. The theory is impossible to disprove but strangely useless. Gottfried Leibniz was a seventeenth-century mathematician who conceived of a world made up of irreducible particles called monads that, taken to their logical conclusion, meant that each person passes their life alone in a self-referential universe of one.

“The mystics of many centuries independently, yet in perfect harmony with each other, have described, each of them, the unique experience of his or her life in terms that can be considered in the phrase, Deus factum sum,” I have become God. In such a world, consciousness could never be lost because it’s part of the cosmic fabric, and my father as a quantum wave function could welcome me back to the great vastness from which we all come.

Our universe was created by unknowable forces, has no implicit reason to exist, and seems to violate its own basic laws. In such a world, what couldn’t happen?

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.

The proposal, sometimes known as biocentrism, and championed by an American doctor named Robert Lanza, protects us from an eternity of individual consciousness while still lifting us out of the meaninglessness of pure biology. Critics say that biocentrism is not a legitimate theory because it can’t be tested, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong. If consciousness comprises an essential part of the physical universe, the very idea of testing its existence may be a logical impossibility.

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

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.

I finally understand how much my father must have trusted me on that trip, how much he must have loved me. 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.