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. All the information you need to survive is right in front of you, and if you don’t, it’s because you made a mistake.

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.

That’s the problem, I thought: we have no idea whether the universe even notices us, much less cares.

In end-stage hypothermia, the dying person may take off their clothes—“paradoxical undressing”—or curl up in a small, dark place, like a closet or under a bed. “Terminal burrowing,” as it is called, is thought to be initiated by a very primitive part of the brain associated with hibernating behavior in other animals.

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.”

Once, after visiting a New York City firehouse, she asked me why the firemen were so small. That stumped me—they were all pretty big, and one was truly a giant. “They’re not small, they’re big,” I answered. Xana thought about that for a moment. “Not compared to the buildings they go into,” she said. Xana had somehow summarized our relationship with a vast universe that doesn’t seem to care or even notice if we die.

Eventually we will all behold the void.

“It doesn’t surprise me that you saw the dead. Not because I have strong beliefs about it, but because I have zero disbelief.”

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

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.

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

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.

The extra years that had been returned to me were too terrifying to be beautiful and too precious to be ordinary.

The word blessing is derived from the Anglo-Saxon word for blood—bledsian—and contains in its meaning the idea that there is no great blessing without sacrifice, and perhaps vice versa.

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 neurochemical explanations for why people hallucinate, but not for why they keep hallucinating the same thing.

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.

You will know yourself best at that moment; you will be at your most real, your most honest, your most uncalculated. If you could travel back in time to make use of such knowledge during your life, you would become exactly the person you’d always hoped to be—but none of us do that. We don’t get that knowledge until it’s too late because then it can’t be tainted by vanity or pride or desire.