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.

but it’s an odd quirk of neurology that when we are fighting the hardest to stay alive, we are hardly thinking about death at all. We’re too busy.

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.

Death annihilates us so completely that we might as well have not lived, but without death, the life we did live would be meaningless because it would never end.

One of the core goals of life is survival; the other is meaning. In some ways, they are antithetical.

When I got home, I told my father the wolves and bears were gone, but that the mountains seemed as wild as ever. “At least you went,” he said. “That’s the real point.”

Hasenöhrl proved that mass and energy determine each other’s values and are therefore the same thing. (“Matter is spirit reduced to the point of visibility—there is no matter,” as Albert Einstein later put it.)

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

Though Pip is alive, he has seen God and been rendered imbecile. “The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul,” Melville writes. “Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths… He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense.”

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.

He didn’t believe in anything as simpleminded as heaven or as extravagant as reincarnation, but he also never looked up at the stars because he said he found the immensity overwhelming.

There was a big red call button by my bed, but I thought of it as the “I give up” button rather than as the “I need help” button.

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 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.

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.

As chemist Addy Pross points out, all human cells are replaced many times over but maintain a pattern—the human body—that persists as long as those cells can metabolize energy.

In the macroscopic world, when a pendulum swings, it does not “jump” from one position to another; it moves in a smooth and continuous way. At the subatomic level, however, electrons are either “here” or “there,” but never in between. They do not swing, in other words; they leap.

He would regularly recite all the scientific words that begin with “al”—alchemy, algebra, alcohol, Aldebaran—to make sure I knew they came from a secular Arab study of the world.

The idea that you will appreciate life more after almost dying is a cheap bit of wisdom easily asserted by people who have never been near death. When you drill down into it—which you must—we are really talking about an appreciation of death rather than of life. Eventually you will be all alone with doctors shrugging because they’ve run out of things to do, and the person you really are thumping frantically in your chest: the successes and catastrophes and affairs and hangovers and genuine loves and small betrayals and flashes of courage and the river of fear running beneath it all, and of course the vast stretches of wasted time that are part of even the most amazing life.

Would God be angry if scientists fully explained Him? Could knowing everything result in everything being taken away?

Without death, life does not require focus or courage or choice. Without death, life is just an extraordinary stunt that won’t stop.

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.

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.