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Summary
Summary
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: (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
National Magazine Award winner Junger (Tribe) pieces together fragmented memories, accounts from his healthcare team and family, and scientific research for a mind-bending exploration of his own near-death experience. Stricken with severe abdominal pain in 2020, Junger was drifting in and out of consciousness in a hospital bed when his father, who had been dead for eight years, seemed to appear, "not so much floating as simply existing above me," and "invit me to go with him." After receiving treatment for a rare pancreatic aneurysm, and with a new awareness that "I was carrying my own destruction around... like a live hand grenade," Junger sought to understand what he'd experienced through the scientific method of inquiry used by his physicist father. Investigations of quantum mechanics, death as entropy, and matter as dependent on human consciousness are interwoven with eloquent philosophical musings that cut against popular notions of death. "The idea that you will appreciate life more after almost dying is a cheap bit of wisdom" from those "who have never been near death," Junger writes. Instead, one develops a paradoxical "appreciation of death... You will know yourself best at that moment; you will be at your most real." It's a riveting and resonant meditation on some of life's biggest questions. (May)
Kirkus Review
A distinguished author and filmmaker reflects on how a near-fatal emergency caused him to rethink the relationship between life and death. Throughout his life, Junger, author of The Perfect Storm and other acclaimed books, courted injury--and his own untimely demise--through high-risk activities like surfing and work as a climber for tree service companies and, later, a war correspondent. Intellectually, he always understood that "death is the ultimate consequence [and] reality" that gives human existence meaning. However, it was not until he almost lost his life to a pancreatic aneurysm, caused by an undiagnosed case of median arcuate ligament syndrome, that his understanding became more viscerally meaningful. By that time, Junger, then in his late 50s, had settled into a more quiet life with his second wife and two small daughters. One morning, sudden abdominal pain "different from any pain I'd ever known" ripped through his body and then continued on and off until the day "the floor reeled away from me as if I were standing on the deck of a ship" and he could not walk unassisted. At the hospital, doctors first thought that he had ruptured his aorta. They later pinpointed the problem as pancreatic, all while Junger lost blood and cycled in and out of consciousness. Just as he felt himself being "pulled…sternly into the darkness," he saw his dead physicist father. Haunted by the visitation, Junger researched near-death experiences in the period after his recovery, and this luminous book is the result. The "answers" he found at the intersection of religion, philosophy, and science--that human consciousness may be woven "in the very nature" of matter that can never be fully known--intrigued him, but they also made him even more grateful for the love that bound him to the living and the dead. Intelligent and poignantly probing. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Curiosity about dangerous jobs led to Junger's first book, The Perfect Storm. As a courageous and determined journalist, he survived many near misses while covering war in Afghanistan. In Freedom (2021), he recounts a 400-mile wilderness trek. In his fifties, Junger stepped away from high-risk quests when his daughters were born. But even a settled and healthy life is vulnerable to crises, as he chronicles in this gripping, profoundly inquisitive account of his near-death experience. COVID-19 prompted Junger and his family to isolate in their Cape Cod home, where he ignored frequent abdominal pain until he landed in the ER on the brink of death. Frantic doctors figured out that he had a ruptured pancreatic artery. While Junger watched the doctors desperately seek ways to stop the bleeding, he was also seeing, to his astonishment, a dark void forming to his left while his late father hovered above him. Junger combines riveting operating-room drama, flush with detailed anatomical explanations, with vivid switchbacks to dangerous adventures in his past as well as forays into medical history, his physicist father's life, quantum mechanics, and the universal elements of near-death experiences. Tracing the ever-wavering lines between science and mystery, reason and spirituality, Junger grapples with the complexity of the brain, the riddle of consciousness, and our views of death. Ardently researched, consummately written, and boldly forthright, this an intensely moving and deeply provocative immersion.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Given Junger's best-selling standing and a magnetizing subject, this is a sure bet for off-the-chart requests.