Not Just a Job: Sebastian Junger: Reporting live from the brink of death

Elisabeth Egan

Over the course of his reporting career, Sebastian Junger has had several close calls with death. A bullet whizzed past his face in Afghanistan; another time, a bomb exploded in his Humvee. Even when he wasn’t covering war, death was a theme in his work. Junger’s most famous book, “The Perfect Storm,” is about extreme weather, but it’s also about a group of men who never came home.

In the introduction to his memoir, “In My Time of Dying,” which Simon & Schuster will publish on May 21, he describes his own near-drowning while surfing — the shock of being shoved underwater as if by an invisible hand, the flashbulb memory of dirty dishes in his sink, the way the shadow of death suddenly eclipsed an ordinary day.

“I was young,” Junger writes, “and had no idea the world killed people so casually.” On June 16, 2020, Junger found himself face-to-face with mortality in a way he’d never been. One minute he was enjoying quiet time with his wife at a remote cabin on Cape Cod in Massachusetts; the next, he was in excruciating pain from a ruptured aneurysm. Hours later, as a doctor inserted a large-gauge transfusion line into his jugular vein, Junger sensed his father’s presence in the room.

His father had been dead for eight years — and he’d been a scientist and a rationalist — but there he was, trying to comfort his son. It didn’t work. Junger writes, “I became aware of a dark pit below me and to my left.” It was “the purest black and so infinitely deep that it had no real depth at all.” He was horrified, knowing that “if I went into that hole I was never coming back.”

Junger survived. Later, he had questions — lots of them. His memoir braids a journalist’s best efforts at answers with a sexagenarian’s complicated acceptance of the inevitable. Last month, Junger, 62, visited the Book Review to talk about his medical ordeal and its aftermath, including his research into near-death experiences and the uncertainty he has learned to live with, if not embrace.

He says, "I came out of the hospital kind of broken. My body healed quickly, but I wound up with psychological issues that are apparently very common for someone who almost died. I couldn’t be alone; I couldn’t go on a walk in the woods. Everything was evaluated in terms of how long it would take me to get to the E.R. — like if I have an aneurysm now, I’m going to die."

"I started writing things down in a notebook because that’s just what I do with experiences and observations. I went to a therapist for a while because after I finished being super anxious, I got incredibly depressed. I recognized this sequence from combat trauma, except it was way worse. You write a book because something comes alive in you while you do it and that’s your obsession for a while. It took a good two years for that point to come," he adds.

He goes on to say, "I was raised to be skeptical of organized religion. So I just cruised through life without any particular thought of spirituality — and no particular need for it. I didn’t have a child, thank God, who died of cancer; nothing happened to me that was so unbearable that I had a need to reach out to a higher power. I was blessed. I’ve had a lucky life. Not easy, but lucky."

There was my father, inexplicably. He was communicating — not like you are, with language, but there was communication. He was like, “It’s OK. You don’t have to fight it. You can come with me.” I was puzzled: “What are you doing here? I’m just here for belly pain.” I was like, “Go with you? You’re dead! I want nothing to do with you!”

The pit was this infinite dark emptiness that opened up underneath me. I was like, “What is that?” I was getting pulled into this thing. That’s when I started getting scared. I said to the doctor, “You have to hurry, I’m going. Right now. You’re losing me.”

The nurse said, “Keep your eyes open so we know you’re still with us,” and it dawned on me: I may not make it out. They might not have an answer to this. It was a terrible feeling.

The next day in the I.C.U., the nurse said, “You almost died last night.” Then I remembered my father. Of course, as a journalist, I’m doubting myself: Are you sure you’re not cooking this thing up?

But my wife said, “The first thing you told me when I walked in was, I saw my dad.” That’s how she knew how serious it had been.

How did the experience change the way you think?

It never crossed my mind to start believing in God. But what did happen was I was like, maybe we don’t understand the universe on a fundamental level. Maybe we just don’t understand that this world we experience is just one reality and that there’s some reality we can’t understand that’s engaged when we die. All this stuff happens — ghosts and telepathy and the dead appearing in the rooms of the dying — that’s consistent in every culture in the world.

Maybe we just keep bumping into this thing that we’ll never understand because we’re basically a dog watching a television. Maybe anything’s possible; and clearly anything’s possible because the universe happened. If there’s ever an example of “anything can happen,” it’s the universe popping into existence from nothing.

I researched the science enough to understand legitimate explanations for neurological phenomena, and it left me with this question: But why all the same vision?

You write, “Finding yourself alive after almost dying is not, as it turns out, the kind of party one might expect. You realize that you weren’t returned to life, you were just introduced to death.” Tell me more.

Getting back to normal life meant learning how to forget that we’re all going to die and could die at any moment. That’s what normal life requires.

Two nights before I went to the hospital, I dreamed that I had died and was looking down on my grieving family. Because I had that experience, which I still can’t explain, it occurred to me that maybe I had died and the dream was me experiencing a post-death reality and that I was a ghost. I went into this very weird existential Escher drawing. Am I here, or not? At one point, I said to my wife, “How do I know I didn’t die?”

She said, “You’re here, right in front of me. You survived.”

I thought, “That’s exactly what a hallucination would say.”

Returning to normal meant stopping thinking like that.

What do you hope readers will take away from the book?

We’re all in an emotionally vulnerable place; it’s just part of being in a modern society with all its wonderful benefits. Every once in a while I write something that allows people to navigate a little bit better. Maybe this book will bring some comfort.