In My Time of Dying
How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife
Ratings9
Average rating3.9
15
How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife
Ratings9
Average rating3.9
A near-fatal health emergency leads to this powerful reflection on death—and what might follow—by the bestselling author of Tribe and The Perfect Storm.
For years as an award-winning war reporter, Sebastian Junger traveled to many front lines and frequently put his life at risk. And yet, the closest he ever came to death was the summer of 2020 while spending a quiet afternoon at the New England home he shared with his wife and two young children. Crippled by abdominal pain, Junger was rushed to the hospital by ambulance. Once there, he began slipping away. As blackness encroached, he was visited by his dead father, inviting Junger to join him. “It’s okay,” his father said. “There’s nothing to be scared of. I’ll take care of you.” That was the last thing Junger remembered until he came to the next day when he was told he had suffered a ruptured aneurysm that he should not have survived.
This experience spurred Junger—a confirmed atheist raised by his physicist father to respect the empirical—to undertake a scientific, philosophical, and deeply personal examination of mortality and what happens after we die. How do we begin to process the brutal fact that any of us might perish unexpectedly on what begins as an ordinary day? How do we grapple with phenomena that science may be unable to explain? And what happens to a person, emotionally and spiritually, when forced to reckon with such existential questions?
In My Time of Dying is part medical drama, part searing autobiography, and part rational inquiry into the ultimate unknowable mystery.
Reviews with the most likes.
Very approachable, interesting read. Book feels like nothing more than a real man sharing his real experiences. No present bias, just observation. Would definitely recommend.
Not the book I was expecting, I'm afraid. Junger is a non-fiction writer I've followed for years but for me, this book had too much jargon, too much medical detail. I wanted more critical thinking about dying, the end of life, philosophical musings about the winter of our years. There was some but it was buried in all the minutiae about his particular situation, medical condition, details of the build-up to the near-fatal event and not enough examination of how his thinking, feeling, life changed as a result of this happening.
Contains spoilers
Told in two parts essentially, part one is a thought provoking exploration of author Sebastian Junger's close call with death, and either a unique glimpse into the afterlife, or the imaginings of his dying brain.
The second part describes Mr Junger's pursuit to understand what happened, what it might mean for each of us to be alive and then to not be alive, and how the universe accounts for it all. Spoiler: nothing is decided, but many interesting facts are explained that may impact that meaning. Food for thought.
I am an admirer of both Junger's War and Tribe so the chances to listen to him narrate his latest book was taken. In My Time of Dying is his story about his near-death experience (NDE) after a pancreatic vein burst that caused major internal bleeding.
He gives a detailed medical account of the actions of the medical staff that took him from his NDE to his survival of an event that generally take the life of the individual. During this medical emergency, he tells of his NDE meeting with his dead father. After full recovery, Junger looks at the NDE from both his journalistic eye and then that from his atheist view point with a reflective writing and telling on the physical and spiritual nature of the individual as he sees it.
Junger is a fine writer, and in this case narrator of his writing. It never felt like a matter of me agreeing or disagreeing with him, confirming one's bias is a futile exercise at the best of times anyway, but his ability to explain his NDE and added to the quality of his layman research makes for a very thoughtful telling and listening experience. My general realist attitude to all things makes me think that NDE is actually what Junger described and researched; the brain shutting down and making death palatable to the individual. What's beyond that? Not much in my opinion as no one has come back to tell the tale. What is beyond can never be known, Junger says as much, but his NDE has made him less sure of his future beyond death.
A very good read and recommended to those of us reaching the end of our days.
