Sebastian Junger has made a career out of exploring questions he’ll never be able to fully answer: What happened to the crew of the Gloucester swordfishing boat Andrea Gail after it lost radio contact with the mainland? Who, exactly, killed Bessie Goldberg in Belmont in 1963?
Now, spurred by a near-death experience of his own, the journalist and author follows perhaps the most universally flummoxing line of inquiry of all: What happens when all this ends? And why is any of it even here in the first place?
“I seem to specialize in writing books about things that will never have a definitive, final answer,” Junger says. “This was another chance to do that, but at a super profound level. We’ll never know the ultimate answers to these questions, like Why is there a universe? How does consciousness work? What happens after we die?”
In the summer of 2020, Junger was rushed to the emergency room in Hyannis. He had temporarily lost sight, his blood pressure had plummeted, and he was hit with pain that felt like “hot lava.” Doctors diagnosed him with a ruptured aneurysm in his pancreatic artery, and as they raced to save him, Junger saw his long-dead father appear in the room with him.
For Junger, a confirmed atheist, the experience opened up the possibility, however slight, that some part of our consciousness might go on living even after our physical bodies die.
From the title and the premise, one might assume that Junger’s latest book, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face-to-Face with the Idea of an Afterlife, will offer the same easy answers found between the covers of the sort of heaven-and-back bestsellers that seem to pop up every few years. But, instead, Junger casts his journalist’s eye on the topic—scouring the research on near-death experiences, speaking with his scientist father’s former colleagues, and eventually ending up in the realms of epistemology and quantum mechanics.
In an interview with Northshore, Junger reflects on his own brush with death and what it might mean for the rest of us.
Q: What was it about your near-death experience that made you take it seriously enough to want to investigate it, rather than to dismiss it as a hallucination?
A: Even as a hallucination, it’s a mysterious thing. I didn’t know I was dying. I wasn’t terrified and projecting something comforting. If I had known, I would have been thinking about my children and my wife. My dad had been dead almost 10 years by then, and I wouldn’t have conjured him up. So, either it’s a neurochemical phenomenon in the dying brain, which is plausible. or, more mysteriously, there’s something about that transition to death that scientists don’t quite understand yet.
Q: For many people, the idea of an afterlife is comforting. But your experience seemed to unsettle you.
A: Well, I didn’t die. I was hurtling toward that moment, but I didn’t actually go into cardiac arrest. The experience might have changed into something more expansive and compelling and pleasant if I had actually died, which is what you hear in the accounts of many, many people who did reach that point. But I was still firmly alive, and I didn’t want to leave that place. My father’s offer of, ‘It’s going to be okay, I’ll take care of you’—that wasn’t appealing.
Q: Have some readers been disappointed that you don’t come down firmly on the side of some sort of afterlife?
A: There was an outcry after a Wall Street Journal article where I said that I was an atheist. Oh my God, were people upset. Reading Amazon reviews, many people absolutely love the fact that I did not put my thumb on the scale. But one of the reviews said something like, ‘Mr. Junger fails to prove that there’s an afterlife. One star.’
Q: When you asked your doctors whether it was common for patients to see their dead relatives or have these sorts of experiences, they shut down the conversation. Why do you think that is?
A: Doctors are in a hurry. They’re very focused on talking about the medical issue and then moving on. They think it’s a completely non-scientific way of thinking. What they’re not thinking is, Well, maybe there is some scientific explanation for this mysterious experience. It probably all sounds like quackery to them.
Q: You write that we all have a relationship with death, whether we want one or not. How did this experience change your own?
Before, my relationship with death was actually a relationship with avoidance, and fear, and denial. And now, because I could no longer deny it, there was an increase in that fear. It skyrocketed to a pretty paralyzing level. But then, finally, when I came out the other side, there was a slight sense of comfort and consolation in the plausible idea that there is some kind of extensive consciousness that we don’t understand, that we’re part of, and that is part of the physical nature of the universe. The idea that, when we die, our individual experience of consciousness is diffused into the broader consciousness—there’s something slightly comforting about that.
Q: You go into detail about the research on near-death experiences, but then you delve into epistemology and quantum mechanics—really meditating on the unknowability of reality. Did it surprise you to head in that direction?
No, I always knew I was going in that direction because I feel like the ultimate answer to everything—to reality—is at the quantum level. That’s the smallest unit of reality, so any scientific explanation for anything has got to include that level of analysis and inquiry.
But the way things work at the quantum level is completely inconsistent with—and seems incompatible with—the way things work at the macroscopic level. They’re utterly contradictory. So if there’s some enigma, some mystery, some unknown involving a post-death existence . . . how would it conceivably work? It would almost have to be at the quantum level, which means something that’s ultimately unknowable, at least at our current level of knowledge.
No one imagines themselves being able to answer this. But the fact that we’re even coming up with coherent questions about it is a kind of victory.
Q: At once point, you even address the question with mathematics and statistics.
A: When I asked one of my father’s former colleagues about the odds of my father appearing above me, he really crunched the numbers, and he came up with 10 to the minus 60. But the same sort of eggheads have crunched the numbers on the odds of the universe existing, and they came up with 10 to the minus 230. So, my father appearing above me in some form is way more likely than the universe existing in the first place—which we know to be the case, because here we are. If the universe exists . . . once you’ve pulled off that party trick, what isn’t possible? So talk to me. What do you got? Oh, there’s a post-death existence? All right, I’ll listen.
Q: You write about being overwhelmed with the miracle of everyday life after nearly dying. Has that continued, or have you settled back into taking your day-to-day life for granted, the way we all do?
You’ve got to function, right? You can’t literally or metaphorically just wind up in the lotus position in the woods, digging how extraordinary everything is. That’s maladaptive, and it’s not the point of living. But our modern society is so distracting, and filled with so many addictive processes—like social media and consumerism and all these things that deaden the human spirit—that I think it’s particularly important to just stop and take stock of the miracle.
So you’re stuck in traffic. Do you realize how insanely unlikely and miraculous this is? Grow up. Stop whining about your circumstances, and just be amazed for a moment.