Allison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Allison Stewart. Celebrated author, journalist and documentarian Sebastian Younger is no stranger to near death experiences. He's been shot at in war zones, threatened while covering conflict, and nearly drowned while surfing. But when a ruptured aneurysm in his fifties sent Sebastian to the emergency room, he had a brush with death that changed his life. While losing nearly a fatal amount of blood, Sebastian felt consciousness fading, and suddenly his father appeared. His dead father. His father who, as a physicist, believed in empirical evidence rather than religion.

Sebastian survives the ordeal, but is left pondering this vision he had while dying and wondering whether it might point to something beyond life. He writes about all of this in his new memoir, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife. Listeners, I am especially grateful to talk with Sebastian today for personal reasons. The day his book came out, it was May 16, right? It was day 79 after I had emergency brain surgery. It was touch and go for a while, and I'm still recovering, but as you can imagine, I read Sebastian's book with great interest. Sebastian, welcome to the show.

Sebastian Junger: Thank you so much.

Allison Stewart: Before this experience, how would you describe your relationship with death?

Sebastian Junger: Well, I tried not to have one. I mean, I was in a lot of war zones. I did work that was dangerous. I was a high climber for tree companies. I took trees down from the top down with the chainsaw on a line, and then I was a war reporter for a long time. I had a lot of near misses, I was blown up by a roadside bomb. I had bullets hit literally inches from my head, and I was even seized by a rebel group in the Niger Delta, and one guy came up to me and said, "When we kill you, I'll be the one to do it."

Allison Stewart: Okay.

Sebastian Junger: My relationship with death was mainly avoiding it. I was very healthy and I didn't have any reason to think that my body would fail me until it did.

Allison Stewart: What you had, it was a congenital issue.

Sebastian Junger: Sort of. The brief description is that I have a ligament that's in the wrong place. It's just a structural problem, it's very rare, but it's a known thing, and it crushed the celiac artery, which is this garden hose that runs down your torso and brings blood to your abdominal organs. The blood had to flow around through smaller blood vessels to get to where they had to go, and they weren't designed for that. One of them, one of the small arteries that goes to the pancreas had a weak spot in it and it ballooned outwards in an aneurysm.

Aneurysms develop over your lifetime. This isn't a sudden thing. This is years, decades. There's no symptoms, and they often go undetected and kill the person who has them, because if you rupture an artery internally, you lose blood very, very quickly, and it's hard to find. If someone stabs you in the abdomen, they rush you to the ER. The doctors know exactly where the problem is, because blood's pouring out of you, and they know where that is. But with an internal hemorrhage, they have no idea, and that's why it has such a terrible fatality rate.

Allison Stewart: What did the effect of knowing that you always had this, you knew that you had this after the fact, you've been carrying around a little tiny bomb inside of you?

Sebastian Junger: A little hand grenade. The effect was that I doubted everything. Like, I came back from the hospital and it was a very common fear, but I had this fear that I could die any day now, any moment. I also had a very common and extremely strange feeling that I wasn't really there, that maybe I had died. I was having a hard time figuring out what was real and what wasn't. I had this sort of real paranoia, it was basically an extreme anxiety disorder, that everything from the hospital on was a kind of dying hallucination, and that I had left my family. I had left my two young daughters and my wife, and that I wasn't really here. As extreme and weird as that sounds, I can't tell you how deeply terrifying it was, if you really are not sure about something that fundamental.

Allison Stewart: It's interesting, your book is in two sections, the what and the if.

Sebastian Junger: Yes. The what part is what happened to me, including this extraordinary vision of my dead father as I was dying in the trauma bay. They were busy inserting a needle through my neck into my jugular to transfuse me, and I needed ten units of blood. Ten people donated blood that saved my life. Blood pressure was 60 over 40 when I got finally got to the ER.

While they were working on my neck, this black pit opened up underneath me and I started to get pulled into it. I was very scared of. I had no idea I was dying, but I was very scared of the abyss. This black abyss and other people who have almost died described the exact same thing. Then suddenly, my dead father appeared above me in this radiant, sort of-- not radiant, but in this sort of energy form. English doesn't have quite the right words for how I experienced him, but there he was above me and slightly to my left.

What he communicated to me was, "It's okay. You don't have to fight it. I'll take care of you. You can come with me." I said to the doctor, because I'm still conscious at this point, I said to the doctor, "You got to hurry. You're losing me right now. I'm going." I didn't know where I was going, but I was outbound, and I knew it, and I knew that I would never come back.

Allison Stewart: Such an interesting detail, that you know that he was on your left?

Sebastian Junger: Very much. The doctors were on my right. Everything felt like life was on my right. Of course, the doctors were all over me, but in my perception, and I'd lost two thirds of my blood, so it was like I was unbelievably drunk. My mind was not working correctly, but there they were, the doctors were on my right, and then the pit and my dad were on the left.

I should rush to say that I'm a lifelong atheist. I'm still atheist. I'm a rationalist, which means I'm a skeptic, which means I wasn't culturally predisposed towards any of these things. The great challenge and journey of my life after that experience was trying to understand it in terms that I respect and can make useful.

Allison Stewart: My guest is Sebastian Junger. In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife is a memoir about his near death experience from [unintelligible 00:07:11] aneurism and how it shaped his life today. Just rolling back a little bit, you had some pain in your abdomen off and on?

Sebastian Junger: Yes.

Allison Stewart: Looking back, do you think you avoided going to a doctor about it?

Sebastian Junger: Yes, I definitely avoided going to a doctor. I'll put it this way. I've ignored a lot of pain in my life, as many people have, and I have this idea that you can live two ways. You can live ignoring things, and you'll live a broader life. You won't be scared to go to Mongolia, whatever. You'll ignore your feelings, you'll ignore inputs and therefore have experiences you wouldn't otherwise have. Or you can just spend your life focusing on things, which means you probably have a less varied life, but a deeper one. I spent a lot of my life ignoring things, so that I could go off and do things.

What I ignored was this periodic pain in my abdomen, which was not debilitating, but it really got my attention enough to make me sit down for a while. It sort of came and went for about six months. It was probably the aneurysm starting to dissect and leak a little blood, and then it would repair itself, which apparently arteries can do. Let me just, if I may, jump in with an extremely strange, maybe the strangest of all of the things that happened to me around then, was that on some level, "my body" knew something was fatally wrong, but my conscious mind obviously didn't or I would have gone to the doctor. I ignored and ignored and ignored.

36 hours before I almost died, before I should have died, in some senses, it like my fatality rate is enormous for what I had two nights prior, at dawn, I had this terrible, terrible dream. The worst dream I've ever had and that I've ever heard of, which was that I was above my family. I had a three-year-old girl and a six-month-old girl and my wife. I was above them and they were crying, and I was trying to get their attention. I was waving my arms and I was shouting, and they couldn't hear me. They couldn't see me.

I was made to understand that I died, and that I was a spirit. I was a ghost. I died through just carelessness and oversight. Like I didn't need to have died and I did die, and now it's too late, and sorry, you're headed out. I was so anguished. I was so anguished that it woke me up. There I was in the gray light of dawn, my family and we all sleep together. I was in bed with my family and I thought, oh, my God. Thank God that was just a dream, because it felt completely real. Basically hours later, I was dying.

One of the problems I had with reality when I came back from the hospital was that I thought maybe because what I had, the dream I had was a classic NDE, a classic near death experience. You're above your family, you can't communicate with them. I knew nothing about any of this, so I thought maybe the dream was actually my experience of dying in my sleep. Everything that followed, going to the hospital, coming back, everything is now just a dying hallucination, and I don't know it.

The way we suspect that people in deep comas actually have an inner life that includes something that might feel like they're living their life. I thought, oh, my God, how do I know? At one point, I really got crazy. I mean, I really sort of descended a little bit into madness, and my poor wife who had been through enough already, at one point, I went to her, and I was like, "Honey, tell me I'm here. Like that I made it, that I'm here." She said, "Of course, you're here. You survived. You're right here. I love you." In my mind, I was like, that's exactly what a hallucination would say.

Allison Stewart: Try again. I'm wondering if you ever thought to yourself, that that was a premonition. That that was your body saying to you, hey, there's something wrong here.

Sebastian Junger: Absolutely, and I've asked many doctors, and they're like, "No, no, no, the body can't. You know, there's no predictive dreams. It's just, you know, et cetera, et cetera," but there are a few who are either more open minded or less rational about it, one or the other. I found one who's a palliative care doctor at Harvard who said, "The body can communicate with the unconscious mind, and it communicates, among other ways, through dreams. You were discharging blood into your abdominal cavity. It's an extreme irritant. I mean, it really is extremely painful when that happens, and the body's fire alarms are going to be going off, and the body communicated with you as best it could."

Basically, I think of it as like, "We've tried signaling to him for six months with pain, the idiot, so we'll try one last attempt to keep him out of the hospital. We'll give him a dream about what's coming," and that didn't even work. My body was like, "All right, we tried."

Allison Stewart: We tried. It's interesting, given your history as a war reporter, and in the book, you detail almost dying while you're surfing, yet I get the impression, this is my impression, is that this was somehow different.

Sebastian Junger: It was very different. The war reporting that I did, I started in Bosnia and Sarajevo in the early '90s. I was in Afghanistan in 1996, and again in 2000 with Massoud, 2001 with American soldiers. Later, in later years, I was in the civil wars in West Africa, et cetera. There were chosen risks. I mean, to me, it was like, "I need to go to to the poker table. I got some chips. I'm going to play some bets, and I'm hoping I leave the table with more chips than I got there with, and that I don't get my clock cleaned." That's what we all do in war zones, we're going to get something out of this, we're willing to wager our life.

If we're smart and play our hand right, the risks are minimal, and we'll come back having gained something. Gain something and having given something. The world needs these tragedies to be reported on, and we gained something professionally. That was the poker table I kept going to. After my friend Tim Hetherington was killed in Libya, Tim was the guy I made restrepo with. We were out in the Korangal Valley in Afghanistan, off and on for a year together. He was killed in combat in Libya. He was hit by fragments from a mortar in the city of Misrata on an assignment. I was supposed to be on with him.

Allison Stewart: I was actually with a friend of his when we got news of it, and she just crumpled. We had to take her in a room, and she couldn't speak. It was such a shocking thing.

Sebastian Junger: He crumpled a lot of people when that happened.

Allison Stewart: I'm sorry. Continue.

Sebastian Junger: I was supposed to be on assignment with him, and the last minute I couldn't go. After I got the terrible news, he bled out in the back of a rebel pickup truck racing for the Misrata Hospital. It occurred to me later, like, I always wondered what it was like for him, and then I realized, oh, I found out because I bled out, too. After he died, I just decided I didn't want to wreck the lives of everyone who loved me like I watched Tim do, and so I stopped war reporting.

My first marriage fell apart. I had a lot of struggles, a lot of problems, and finally I got myself together and remarried and had this wonderful family. I thought, now I'm done taking risks, so I'm good. I'm healthy, I'm not a walking heart attack, I'm good. I can run 10 miles if I need to. Like, prove me wrong, I'm fine. I'm fine for the next 20 years, at least. I stopped thinking about mortality.

We were living in a house that was very remote during COVID, the end of a dead end dirt road in Massachusetts on Cape Cod. There's no cell phone service. When it rains, the phone lines go out. The landlines go out, so there isn't even phone service sometimes. When my aneurysm ruptured, that's where we were. It took an hour and a half to get to the hospital, which that alone could have killed me.

Allison Stewart: My guest is Sebastian Junger. The name of the book is, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife. You're a reporter, you decide to put your reporter's hat on. Who did you want to talk to for this book? Who did you want answers from, or at least their best guess?

Sebastian Junger: The first thing I had to do was confirm my memories, because I was skeptical of the accuracy of my memories, which we all are as journalists. We all must be all the time, even with all your blood in your veins, much less a third of your blood, so I interviewed my wife. I was in and out of consciousness. We were in a cabin in the woods. She had to drag me down a trail to get to the dirt driveway, where we got one signal, cell phone bar signal. She had to drag me out of there. I was in and out of consciousness, and then I started going blind.

I got to interview her about what it was like dealing with me. Then I interviewed the guy who was in the back of the ambulance with me. Then I interviewed the doctors in the ER, who immediately realized catastrophic blood loss, internal hemorrhage, this guy's probably gonna die. They didn't say this, but my sense is that they were all like, we'll do what we can.

I just wanted to interview everyone who was part of this drama to confirm that what I remembered was accurate. One of the people I wanted to interview and never was able to, was a nurse in the ICU. I woke up the next morning, and I had no idea that I'd almost died. None. I'd spent six hours in the interventional radiology suite un-sedated while they threaded a catheter through my venous system, trying to get this little flexible tube through the kinks and turns of my vascular system to the area that was bleeding, and it took them like five hours. They almost gave up and sent me into surgery, which I probably wouldn't have survived.

I watched them deliberate what to do. It's terrifying. Then they managed to do it. They saved me, an almost impossible thing that they did. Then I woke up in the ICU the next morning, and the nurse said, "Congratulations, Mr. Junger. You survived. You almost died last night. No one can believe you made it. It's kind of a miracle." I was shocked. I was absolutely shocked. I had no idea, and then she left. She came back a while later and said, "How you doing?" I was throwing up blood. I was a total mess, but I said, "Well, what you told me is terrifying, and I keep thinking about it." She said, "Try this. Instead of thinking about it like something scary, try thinking about it like something sacred."

I don't know how she meant it. She's talking to an atheist, and I have a very good understanding of the word sacred. It's a secular meaning. I mean, I use that word in a secular sense, but it's a very powerful word. I really took her advice to heart, and as soon as she said what she said, I remembered the black pit, and I remembered my father. It makes me think that I didn't somehow later, cook this up or something. It makes me trust that I really did have that experience.

Then I tried to find her later at the hospital, and not to add a kind of whoo, mystery thing to this at all, but I couldn't find her. No one even knew who I was talking about. There was just no nurse by that description in the hospital in the ICU that day, and so I never found her. I never got to ask her, like, "Wow, your words helped me incredibly. What did you mean by them?"

Allison Stewart: You're listening to my conversation with Sebastian Junger, author of the new memoir, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife. We'll have more with Sebastian after a quick break. This is All Of It.

You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Allison Stewart. We continue my conversation with author and journalist Sebastian Junger, who nearly died a few years ago from a ruptured aneurysm in his abdomen. He writes about that experience in his new memoir, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife. Let's get back into my interview with Sebastian Junger.

When you talk to neuroscientists, what did they explain about a phenomenon like yours?

Sebastian Junger: There's two camps, of course. There's the camp, and some of them are neuroscientists who say that the thousands of cases of near death experiences that involve visions of dead loved ones coming to escort the dying across the threshold, and hovering above your own body, watching the doctors trying to restart your heart. Between the dream that I had and the experience that I had, these NDEs were very, very familiar, and there's thousands of them, and they occur in societies all around the world in quite similar forms, and have throughout the ages, it seems.

Some doctors and researchers feel that that amounts to real evidence that there's, I hate the word afterlife, but some post death existence of the individual, we'll put it that way. Afterlife just conjures up something too much like us reclined on a hammock with a daiquiri floating through eternity, but some kind of post death existence, and a meaningful post death existence. Then there's a lot of neuroscientists, et cetera, who are like, "Nonsense. We can produce hallucinations in the brain, no problem. Here, have some LSD. We can spin you in a centrifuge like they do with fighter pilots, to the experience, 4 or 5Gs, to see at what point they pass out, and they will have visions, on and on. This is the dying brain, and we know that there's a flood of gamma waves when the brain dies, and gamma waves are associated with memory, and it just all makes sense neurochemically.

As I was doing this research, at first, frankly, I was in such a sort of anxious place, even though I'm an atheist, I found myself rooting for an afterlife. I was like, "Wow, that's pretty convincing. Oh,maybe we don't have to worry after all." I found myself doing that. Then I read the rationalists, or people like my father, who was a physicist and completely by the book, down the line skeptic, and I was like, "Oh, well, it was nice while it lasted, but I guess there's nothing to this."

It was sort of with one exception, and what I didn't understand, like, we know that if you give a room full of people LSD, they'll all hallucinate. The neurochemistry of that is not a mystery, but they won't all hallucinate the same thing. There is no drug that will give everyone the same hallucination, and what's weird about the dying is that, those who make it back to us is that their experiences, they're not all identical, but they fall into just three or four sort of basic buckets, and one of them is a dead loved one comes to receive you, like my father did. When my mother was dying, her brother came. When my father was dying, his sister came, who had killed herself when she was 16, decades earlier.

These people aren't even clinically dead, they're on the way out in their last days and hours. I wasn't dead either. I was definitely on my way out, but my heart was still beating. What I don't understand, the thing that gives me pause is the consistency of those visions, that only the dying see the dead.

Allison Stewart: Did faith ever creep into your mind? Was it something you sat and thought about, or just no?

Sebastian Junger: Faith in God, in religion?

Allison Stewart: Faith in a post life. Doesn't have to be religion. It has nothing to do with God, but just a post life.

Sebastian Junger: It did when I read about the mysteries of quantum mechanics. I was like, there might be a post death existence at a quantum level that we interface with sometimes in ways that are really puzzling and mysterious, like I did with my father. We might be looking at reality, like a dog is looking at a television screen. Like, we have no idea of the colossal context around this screen that we take to be reality. There's this enormous context that's creating the images that we see, like a dog can't understand the context that creates the images on the television screen.

If you mean faith in that sense, yes, I had faith in the rational process that came up with these unbelievable mysteries of quantum physics. But I didn't turn to faith in a monotheistic, judeo christian God. That, I did not do.

Allison Stewart: Why?

Sebastian Junger: I mean, I saw my father, not God. If I'd seen God in the trauma bay, we'd be having a different conversation, and my book would be a different book and probably selling a lot better. There's two issues. A creator God could create this universe and not give us an afterlife. I mean, the universe went from nothing to hundreds of millions of light years across in an amount of time too small to measure. Now, it might have been a creator God that set that in motion and decided, all right, we're going to have biological beings in this universe, we're going to have kangaroos and turtles and worms and humans and birds, and when they die, they decompose, and there's nothing else. Or you could have a universe that started through purely mechanistic means, a completely physical universe, no God, but in that mechanistic universe, there is some kind of post death quantum reality.

Like, you could have either. You don't need a God to have a post death reality, or vice versa. You could have either. You could have both. They're not twinned. They don't require each other. As far as God goes, I've just never seen any evidence. I believe in gravity, which you can't see, or I don't understand how it works. It's a great mystery. Why should things fall? I have no idea, and I don't think you do either. But I do know that if you throw a rock out the window, it will fall to the ground and it might hit someone, so don't do it. I've just never seen the equivalent evidence for God other than the existence of the universe in the first place. But that's a very tenuous argument that that means there is a God. That's pretty easy to refute.

Allison Stewart: Do you consider yourself a small a atheist after this has happened, rather than a capital a atheist?

Sebastian Junger: I'm not sure what the difference would be. I'm as atheist as you can be.

Allison Stewart: Okay, then you're capital A. You still hold atheist.

Sebastian Junger: I mean, believing in God, that's an active practice. It's not passive. It's active, and I don't go through my day or my life actively believing in a God. That is part of how I make decisions, how I understand reality. I'm not doing that, it's an active thing. It's like you can't choose to fall in love with someone. You may fall in love with them and you can even marry them, and not be in love with them. You can go to church and not believe in God, and I've done that many times. But to really believe in God, you're making an active choice, and it's one that I can't will in myself, and I just don't believe in a God, and I have no reason to think that one exists. Which returns the value of life to its natural place, which is, as we experience it. Not in the hereafter and not in heaven and hell, and the original sin that we may or may not have been born with, et cetera, but in the right here, right now, and how we act with other people.

Allison Stewart: How has your life changed? What do you do that's different?

Sebastian Junger: Pursuant to that, I am sometimes painfully and sometimes ecstatically aware of the miracle that any of this, including you, including me, this table, the universe, and everything else exists. Like, it sometimes it's so overwhelming, it's almost like a kind of drug trip. I don't do drugs, but the way that that's been described to me, I'm like, oh, my God, this is almost hallucinatory. It's so intense. I have moments like that, and they were so intense for a while that they really actually got in the way of me functioning for some time after this happened to me.

I know it's a sort of trite and cliche, but I try to be present because that's all we have. That is all we have. That's all we know that we have is the present moment with the people that we're with. I had this idea, like none of us know that this isn't the last day of our lives. You know this all too well, you wake up in the morning, you don't know. Nobody knows. If you were somehow told, you know what, you're gonna be executed tomorrow at dawn. You have one day, one day to wrap things up. Horrible thing, right? Who would you want to be on that last day? What kind of values would you present to the world? Who would you want to be? I'm guessing you wouldn't be on TikTok a whole lot.

I'm guessing you would want to be very close to the people you love, and treat them with kindness and reverence. You probably wouldn't indulge in the petty resentments that can overcome us with some people that we don't love. You might stop and stare in amazement at a tree and think, wow, I'm going to miss trees and etcetera. It just occurred to me, and I know this is impossible, and I'm not meaning you should sit in the lotus position in the woods all day long, but why not try to live every day as if you knew you were going to die tomorrow?

I mean, it was just with that state of mind, and there's my flip phone on the table, one of the ways I do that, is I don't have a smartphone, because I've never had a smartphone, and I watch the algorithms, which are fiendishly well designed, suck people into a non reality. It's not reality. It's a non reality.

Allison Stewart: That's so interesting you should say that, because when I could concentrate, when I knew right from left, even though I couldn't tell anybody my right from left, somehow I managed to take my email off my phone. Don't know how, and I finally logged on to Instagram, and I said, "What is this? Why am I spending so much time on this?" It all struck me as silly.

Sebastian Junger: They, they, meaning the technology companies that developed this stuff, they are taking your attention. They're taking your attention away, which means they're taking your life away. Your attention is your life, and vice versa. Basically, they're taking your life and monetizing it to their benefit. That is what they're doing. I know that there are people that need smartphones because they have certain jobs, and I totally get it. But more broadly, what have we done to ourselves? Even if you have to have a smartphone, you don't have to have social media on it. You don't have to go on Instagram. You don't have to do any of that garbage. It's not your life. It's the opposite of your life, and we've somehow been conned into thinking it's the essence of our life, and it's not. That, to me, is just a grotesque sin.

Allison Stewart: When they told me I was going to have brain surgery, when they thought it was a cancerous tumor, it was our last time to eat. It's like, "What are we going to eat? What are you going to have for your last dinner?" My sister, my niece and I, we shared an ice cream sundae. That's my last thing. I thought like, wouldn't that be great, just to share ice cream sundae with your sister and your niece?

Sebastian Junger: How terrifying. I can't imagine what you went through.

Allison Stewart: Oh, five days of five days of or what is it?

Sebastian Junger: Yes, I mean, I didn't have anything to dread. I woke up with the knowledge that I had survived, and that was enough to make me half crazy. I can't imagine. My wife said something really interesting to me as I struggled with this. She said, "Sebastian, do you feel lucky or unlucky that it happened?" In other words, not that I survived, of course, but if I could push a button and make it not have happened, would I push that button? I didn't know how to answer her. She's many times asked me questions I couldn't answer. This is one of them.

I thought about it and thought about it, and I finally, I sort of tracked down the meaning of the word, basically, are you blessed or you cursed? Essentially what she was saying. I tracked down the word blessing and the etymology of it, and it's derived from the Anglo-Saxon word bletzjean, which means blood. The idea was that there is no blessing that doesn't come without a wound, that it's blood that sanctifies things, that makes battlefields sacred, that makes childbirth sacred. It's blood.

That there's no blessing without a wound, and maybe in my mind, maybe there's no wound without a blessing. My wife's question, which was wonderful, was also a false choice, because it's not either one. They're twinned. Blessing and a curse are twinned. They're forever tied at the waist, and you get them both at the same time. When I saw it like that, on some level, it released me from some of my sort of torment about this.

Allison Stewart: The book is, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife. It's by Sebastian Junger. Sebastian, thank you for joining us.

Sebastian Junger: Such a pleasure to talk to you.

 

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