“In My Time of Dying” is an atheist’s exploration of the idea of an afterlife

Note: Text has been edited and does not match audio exactly.

Phoebe Neidl: Hello and welcome, listeners. My name is Phoebe Neidl, and I'm an editor here at Audible. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with the celebrated journalist, bestselling author, and Academy Award-nominated documentary filmmaker Sebastian Junger. His books include The Perfect Storm, A Death in Belmont, War, and Tribe. Welcome, Sebastian.

Sebastian Junger: Thank you very much for having me.

PN: Thank you for joining us. So, today we'll be talking about your new book, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife. This is about a near-death experience you had in 2020. You were rushed to the hospital with an abdominal pain, which you later came to understand was a ruptured artery and you were internally bleeding to death. In short, you came very, very close to dying on a trauma ward table. And in that moment, an extraordinary thing happened to you. Can you describe for our listeners that moment when you saw your father?

SJ: Yes. So, I should start by saying that I'm an atheist. I've been an atheist my whole life. My father was an atheist and a physicist. I'd lost probably two thirds of my blood at the point when I finally got into emergency care. The moment that you mentioned, what was going on around me is that a doctor was trying to get a large-gauge needle directly into my jugular vein through my neck to transfuse me because I ended up needing 10 units of blood, and there's only 12 units in the human body. So, I needed a lot of blood.

While he was doing that, I noticed a black pit that had opened up underneath me. It was sort of infinitely black and deep and absolutely terrifying, and seemed to be pulling me in. And, you know, I had no idea that I was dying, but I was like a wounded animal, and my instincts were like, "Don't go into the pit." Like, "Whatever you do, stay out of the pit." I was in a lot of pain as well. My abdomen was filled with blood that had emptied out of my vasculature and was just in my abdominal cavity, which is very painful for your organs. And I started panicking because I was getting pulled into this pit. And then I saw my dead father above me. And it wasn't like he was a cardboard cutout of my father. It wasn't quite that crisp and real. It was like his energy was there, and he was communicating with me. And he was very sort of benevolent, as it were, his arms opened wide, and he was saying, communicating, "It's okay. You don't have to fight it. You can come with me. I'll take care of you."

I was horrified. I didn't know I was dying. I had two young children and I was married and a whole life, and I was only 58 years old. And I was like, "Go with you? You're dead. I'm not going anywhere with you. We got nothing to talk about, Dad. Like, get outta here." I couldn't believe it. And I said to the doctor, because I was still conscious and conversant, I said to the doctor, "You gotta hurry. You're losing me right now. I'm going." And then that was the last thing I remembered for a while.

PN: You mentioned being an atheist, and the afterlife is a topic that traditionally has been tackled through a religious framework. And one of the reasons I was so excited when I saw your book coming out was because I knew you would bring a fresh approach to it, because it really is a topic at the crossroads of not only religion, but philosophy and biology and physics. And you get into all of that in the book. But I'm curious, at what point did you realize you needed to write a book about this experience and bring your journalistic skills to bear in understanding what happened to you?

SJ: They managed to save me, barely, and my odds of dying were extremely high. In fact, everyone was shocked that I survived. And the next morning in the ICU when I woke up, the nurse said that to me. She said, "You almost died last night. In fact, no one can believe that you made it." And when she said that, suddenly I remembered my father. I remembered seeing my dead father and I remembered the pit. Of course it was terrifying because I had no idea that I'd almost died. And it's very disorienting information to get. And the nurse left the room, and then she came back a little while later and said, "How are you doing?" And, I mean, I was doing very poorly. I was throwing up blood. I was in a huge amount of pain. I mean, I was a mess. I lied. I said, "Well, I'm doing okay. But actually, what you said about almost dying, that's terrifying, and it really scared me. And I don't know what to do with it." And she said, "Try this. Instead of thinking about it like something scary, try thinking about it like something sacred." And then she walked out of the room.

"For me, sacred means making life more dignified, allowing people to live with more dignity and more courage and less fear and less pain. Anything that does those things for people is a sacred process."

And so when did I start thinking about writing this book? It was at some point later, after I came home. You know, physically I'd been saved, but psychologically I was enormously traumatized and had a terrible anxiety disorder that I could drop dead at any moment. And then I started to worry that I actually had died and that I was a ghost and that only I didn't know that I died, and that I was imagining my daughters and my wife around me. I was imagining everything. I was imagining that I made it home from the hospital and this was all a dying hallucination.

And I know it sounds sort of silly and like a thought experiment, but actually I was in such a fragile state that I was really quite scared of the idea. And at one point, I said to my wife, Barbara, "Just tell me I'm here right now. Like, just tell me that I'm alive." And she said, "Yes, of course. You're right here. You're safe." And in my mind, I thought, "That's exactly the kind of thing that a hallucination would say."

So, to answer your question, after that I thought, "I should write about this." Like, I've been going through front lines my whole life as a war reporter. I stopped covering wars after my colleague and friend, Tim Hetherington, was killed. Then the front lines came to me. What did I learn? I've been going to front lines and coming back with valuable information my whole life. What did I learn on this final front line? How could I take this process that happened to me and make it sacred? And I don't need a religious context, to use that word. For me, sacred means making life more dignified, allowing people to live with more dignity and more courage and less fear and less pain. Anything that does those things for people is a sacred process, and I thought maybe I could address some of our collective fear of death because I was allowed to look right at it and come back. And not that many people are.

PN: A lot of your work has dealt with death. You immersed yourself in a particularly remote and dangerous part of Afghanistan. You have not shied away from danger in your life, and you also like to wrestle with big, philosophical topics in your work. So, does this book feel very much a piece of your larger portfolio, or would you say it stands apart for you in some ways?

SJ: Well, the journalistic process for me is sort of inviolate. I mean, you just cannot change it whether you're writing about yourself or others. I had an extremely subjective experience. I mean, my blood oxygen had cratered. I was in and out of consciousness. I have very, very strange memories. My mind was not working very well. I'm the ultimate unreliable narrator, except that the things that I saw are also quite interesting and consistent with many, many other people who have gone to the threshold of death. But what I was not going to do was just write a book about what I remembered and not report around it.

So, I interviewed all the doctors who would talk to me. I did a lot of research about how I came to lose so much blood, and then what happens around the moment of death. And there's a huge amount of research on what are called NDEs, near-death experiences. And so I researched those, partly because I wanted to understand them and partly because I was trying to reassure myself. I was in a very strange, isolated, weird place after this happened. It wasn't a big party. It wasn't like, "Oh, wow. I survived.” It was a very somber, frightening place. And I found, and I say this with some embarrassment as a lifelong atheist and rationalist, I found myself, as I read through these accounts of near-death experiences of other people, where the dead came to usher them across and people who knew things they shouldn't have known while they were dying, and very mysterious things. As I read about these things, I found myself kind of rooting for an afterlife, which is embarrassing to say because I'm not religious and I haven't thought like that at all in my life.

And, you know, finally I realized that it's possible there could be some sort of post-death existence and no God. I mean, you don't need the two things together. People will say to me, "So, are you still an atheist?" I'm like, "Yeah, I am still an atheist. I actually don't believe in God." But my mind has been opened to the possibility that we actually don't understand reality or the universe or consciousness particularly well, and that there's some sort of post-death existence maybe at the sort of quantum, subatomic level that allows for something after death that we don't understand, but that sort of keeps poking us in our living lives in ways that sort of maybe we'll never understand. As I say in my book, we might have the same understanding of reality that a dog has watching television, like just no understanding at all of why those images are there and how they work.

PN: There's so much there I want to unpack in your answer, but I do want to ask first, too, about the narration, because you narrated this audiobook, and I can't really imagine this story being narrated by anyone else. It's so personal. It's so powerful coming from you. And you've narrated several of your books at this point. How is that process for you? Did you experience the story differently at all in the course of narrating it?

SJ: Yes. I mean, reading a book-length piece into a microphone takes days. It's very, very hard. I mean, it requires this just insane focus, and you become unbearably aware of what your mouth and tongue is doing while it tries to say words [laughs]. And you get so self-conscious about trying to speak that you can't speak. I mean, it's really a bizarre sort of circle. You have to not think about it in order to do it. And as soon as you think about it, you stop being able to do it and you stumble.

This recent book and the one before, there were parts of them that were quite emotional for me. I mean, the first book that I read, War, also was very emotional. And so one of the things I had actually had to struggle with was to keep my feelings from sort of becoming evident in the recording. I would start to choke up a little bit. And I know in one recording, I think the engineer started to choke up and ask for a break. With this, very much so, I sort of was reliving it one sentence at a time.

But also, I'm a writer and I can't help but notice sort of small errors and bad language that while I'm reading through it, I'm sort of editing it as I go and then stopping the recording and saying, "Hey, please note this down. Get rid of that comma. I don't know why I put a comma there." Like that kind of obsessive stuff. But it unites you with your work. Reading your work aloud for an audiobook unites you with your work as an author in a way that nothing else does, not even reading in public. It's a very, very intimate, grueling, and ultimately pretty profound process.

PN: Yeah, you did a beautiful job. Like I said, it was so powerful hearing it straight from you. It felt like there's no other way this story could've been told in audiobook, so it was great. So, into the science aspect of this, some of the quantum physics that you touched on, it's really fascinating. And I'm not going to try to recount it because it's complicated and I'll screw it up [laughs]. I'm not a physicist. But you do a beautiful job of explaining a lot of it in the book. But I did love this conclusion that you reach at one point. Quote: “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 dead father appearing above me in a trauma bay is the least of it.” So, I was just curious what did you learn about the science in all of this that maybe felt most revelatory?

SJ: Well, one of the things that began to puzzle and excite and even alarm physicists about 100 years ago was what they were finding in the quantum level, at the subatomic level. And what they found was that a particle, like an electron, or photon, could be in two places at once. If you do the famous double-slit experiment, so that there's a barrier that photons cannot pass through and you have two slits, and you fire a photon at this barrier, it will go through both slits simultaneously and leave marks on a strike plate on the other side, showing it went through both slits at the same time. Which is impossible, right? You can't walk through two doorways at the same time. But at the quantum level, it's not impossible. It will do that unless you're observing it. And if there's a conscious mind, not a houseplant, not a mouse, but a conscious mind, a fully conscious mind, a human mind, watching it, then the photon has to pick one slit. It cannot violate what we consider to be an immutable law of nature.

"Reading your work aloud for an audiobook unites you with your work as an author in a way that nothing else does, not even reading in public. It's a very, very intimate, grueling, and ultimately pretty profound process."

So that gave rise to the idea that human observation, conscious observation, actually creates the world that's being observed, and that before it's observed, the world, the universe, reality exists in all possible forms as an almost infinite possibility, until it's observed. And then it collapses into one single form that we know today as the universe. It's totally preposterous except it's hard to avoid any other conclusion. It's impossible to disprove.

But that's just the beginning of the weirdness! If you look at the fact that we are here, that the universe is here, it's almost infinitely unlikely. The chance of a universe existing that permits biological life and consciousness has been calculated at one chance in a number that has 230 zeros after it. So, when you're talking about something that unlikely, almost everything's possible. And one way to think about it is that in an infinity of time, eventually all things must happen, including a universe that comes from nothing and expands to a size that is hundreds of millions of lightyears across in an amount of time that's too small to measure. Even that will happen in an infinity of time, and here we are.

But my mind has been opened to the possibility that we actually don't understand the physical nature of the universe and our existence and consciousness. And I'm in good company. I mean, the brilliant, brilliant scientists around 100 years ago that pioneered all this quantum craziness, several of them were, including [Erwin] Schrödinger, were quite convinced that there was something akin to a universal consciousness and that we as individual humans are a tiny little expression of the universal consciousness. And that is echoed in a modern theory called biocentrism. And biocentrism suggests that consciousness is part of the physical universe the way gravity is. It's a necessary force that you cannot see but that affects everything, and that without it, the universe would not exist in the form that it does. Unprovable, un-disprovable. But it does make sense of a lot of things that otherwise seem nonsensical.

PN: So, near-death experiences like yours, seeing a dead relative, or the sense of rising above your body and watching the scene from above, are pretty universal in that very similar phenomena have been recorded across time and across cultures. So, the question comes down to, is there some sort of cosmic explanation for this recurrence, like an afterlife or a universal consciousness, or is it all just a trick of the brain, a neurochemical reaction we have to dying. And my question to you is, do you think the answer to this is knowable? Will it be something scientists have a concrete answer to, and humans will look back at our ignorance as like the equivalent to when people didn't know the Earth rotated around the Sun?

SJ: So, if you look at the literature, there have been thousands and thousands of accounts compiled of NDEs. And doctors and researchers, many of them have decided that this suggests that there is a kind of proof of some sort of post-death existence. And these people are more likely to write books because, of course, it's easier to sell a book saying there's an afterlife than to sell a book saying that you've proven that there is no afterlife, right? The popular literature is weighted towards sort of the afterlife crowd.

But there's equally serious scientists and doctors who’ve said, "Nonsense," that we can explain all this through neurochemicals and low blood oxygen and epileptic seizures and all kinds of science. And those arguments are extremely convincing. I mean, I found them very, very convincing and almost dispiriting. Except for one thing. And it stood out in my mind and, personally, I feel [was] never really properly explained by the rationalists, the non-afterlife people. We know that if you give a roomful of people LSD, they will all hallucinate. And we know exactly why, sort of neurochemically. But they will not all hallucinate the same thing. And what's very strange about dying is that the dying very commonly see the dead, and no one else in the room does. Hospice nurses report this constantly.

My mother, as she was dying, saw her dead brother, who she was not on good terms with. It was not a comfort to see him. In fact, she was quite angry about it. They were not on good terms. And I said, “That's probably Uncle George. You have to be nice to him. He's come a very long way to see you." And she frowned and she said, "Well, we'll see about that." So, the visions of the dead are not, I don't think, conjured up as an unconscious way to comfort oneself. There is no rational explanation, hallucinations, maybe, but not the dying all hallucinating the dead. Even people who didn't know they were dying. And sometimes, this has been reported over and over again, dying people will hallucinate or see a person who they didn't know had died because [that person] had just died. And that's a very, very mysterious thing.

My book is divided into two sections, “What” and “If.” “What” is what happened to me. “If” is, what if there was something more? How would that possibly work? So, personally, I think the odds are we're biological beings and there is no, quote, “afterlife.” But I can see that there could be. I can see that there's a legitimate question. And how would it work? And that's when I get into sort of quantum physics, because I feel like in nonreligious, rational terms, the greatest possibility for a scientific explanation of these very strange phenomena lies at that level. But of course, I don't come to any conclusion. How could I? And maybe humans never will be able to. Like the dog staring at the TV screen, we just may not be smart enough to understand the context around the reality that we take to be all of life.

PN: Do you feel like you actively live your life differently than you did before this happened to you?

SJ: Absolutely. I'm an older father, so my first child was born when I was 55. So, already I had a somewhat painful awareness of mortality because I just did the numbers. I'm like, "Oh, my God. When she graduates college, I'm going to be in my 70s. I hope I'm still around." And then I almost died. So, I came to this realization, and this is going to sound a little bit trite, but I sort of lived it. I was just, at times, awestruck by the fact that I existed, that I exist at all, that the world exists at all. And it's easy to sort of say that thought, and it's like, "Yeah, yeah. Right. Of course, it's amazing." But if you really live the amazingness of it, it's quite mind-altering. I don't drink alcohol. I don't do drugs. I don't do anything. Once in a while, I smoke a cigarette, but that's it. You can almost give yourself a kind of drug trip focusing on just how stunning the current moment is and how fleeting. And so I started to sort of play with that a little bit. It almost felt like a kind of Zen practice.

"Personally, I think the odds are we're biological beings and there is no, quote, 'afterlife.' But I can see that there could be. I can see that there's a legitimate question."

I also had this realization, you know, I live in New York and I go back and forth to Massachusetts. And often, you get stuck on the Cross Bronx Expressway on a hot day with a broken air conditioner, et cetera. I developed this sort of amazing way of calming myself down because, of course, if you're in a traffic jam, it all feels like a big plot to keep you from getting where you're going and make you miserable. And I had this awareness. Suddenly I was like, "Relax. You're traffic too. Like, you're someone else's traffic. This isn't being done to you. You're part of this." And when you look at all of life like that, something in you relaxes. It can be quite a nice state.

I also found, after I finished the book, I found an extraordinary account by Dostoevsky, the Russian writer, who was almost executed when he was in his 20s by the Tsarist regime. He had been talking about liberating the serfs and other sort of outrageous things at the time in the 1840s, and the Tsar’s police arrested him and his buddies and threw them in jail, and they spent eight months in jail. And then, you know, came time to be let out and they put them all in a carriage. It wasn’t a particularly serious crime, so they assumed they were going to be released. And instead, they drove them to a city square and tied them to posts and lined up soldiers in front of them in a firing squad. And the order was given to charge their arms and raise and aim their rifles. And Dostoevsky, in that moment, saw sunlight glinting off a church roof and thought, "In moments, I'm going to be part of the sunlight. I'll be part of all things. And if somehow I should survive this, I will turn every moment into a miracle, the miracle that it actually is." And then a rider galloped into the town square and said, "The tsar has forgiven them." It was all a bit of theater.

Two of the men in that small group were insane for the rest of their lives. What Dostoevsky managed to do was use it as a way to turn every moment into a miracle, as he said, to really value this extraordinary and extraordinarily bizarre thing that we experience.

PN: That's amazing. Yeah, I never heard that story. So, what is next for you, do you think? Do you know what you're interested in working on next, or are you working on anything now?

SJ: You know, my wife will tell you that I don't think ahead very well. And that's on a day-to-day level, much less year to year. I have no idea what book I'll do next. I didn't see this one coming. I didn't see the last one coming. The books that I've written, I never saw coming particularly far out. So, I'm thinking that that will probably be true again. It's hard to travel. I don't really want to travel because of my family. And so I can imagine the unthinkable for a journalist: I can imagine trying fiction, which seems like a very mysterious and intimidating project, maybe a little bit like going to church would feel like for me, like a completely forbidden no-go zone, but that actually one day might make me want to do it.

PN: I was actually going to ask you that, because you're such a beautiful writer. You're such a master of narrative nonfiction, and I was curious if you had ever contemplated fiction. So that's really interesting to hear that you're contemplating that. I would look forward to that. That would be fascinating. You mentioned the Dostoevsky story and also just sort of the sacred duty of journalists to sometimes help people understand things. Do you have any other recommendations, either books that you've listened to or read, around this topic or maybe any other sort of topic that you really, really loved that maybe you've read recently or in your research for this that you would recommend?

SJ: So, Joan Didion of course wrote a really classic book called The Year of Magical Thinking that I don't think had a lot of emotionality but it was very precise in its discussion of grief and loss. And she's a stunning writer. I would circle back to her. One of the writers that I grew up reading was Peter Matthiessen. He wrote an amazing novel, I mean maybe the great American novel, called At Play in the Fields of the Lord. But he also lost his wife when he was very young to cancer and wrote a book called The Snow Leopard, where he went into the Himalayas trying to make peace with the loss and with mortality. I'm friends with a friend of his. And as Peter was dying, the last thing he said, apparently, when he was watching the hospice nurse rushing around taking care of things, and he said, "Oh, my God. Look how hard I'm making that poor woman work." That was the last thing he said. So, you know, he was a man with a beautiful awareness of other people and other people's experiences. Peter Matthiessen is amazing.

In terms of fiction, I’ve read Cormac McCarthy most of my life. He's a just incomparable writer. His last book, The Passenger, puzzled people a bit. Then when I realized, because of my experience, I realized that I was reading it, this whole puzzling novel—I can't prove this and I've never heard anyone else say it—but it seems to be a hallucination that his character had. His character's name is Western. It seems to be a hallucination that Western has while he is in a coma in France after a car accident before they pull the plug on him. And the clue to that comes in the companion volume, Stella Maris, that's basically narrated by his sister. She says, "Yeah, we had to pull the plug on my brother." And then you realize, "Oh, my God. That whole weird story, that took place in his mind." And I realized that only because of some of the doubts and fears that I had about what's reality and what isn't. So, if you really want to dive deep, dive into The Passenger [laughs], because there's a really profound mystery at the center of that that I really haven't heard discussed yet. And I'm very, very curious if that rings true for anyone else.

PN: Yeah, that sounds very thematically related to some of the stuff you were dealing with in your book. That sounds really interesting. So, my final question to you is, is there anything in particular that you most hope listeners take away from this book?

SJ: Life is an inexplicable miracle. And you can use religious thoughts to come to that truth, but you don't need to. But either way, if you live your life without circling back to that understanding pretty regularly, if you live your life without doing that, you are really not living your life, and that's a pity.

PN: Wise words. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Sebastian. This has been a fascinating discussion. It's a fascinating book. I'm really excited for people to listen to it.

SJ: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure talking to you.

PN: And listeners, you can get In My Time of Dying on Audible now.