Sebastian Junger’s In My Time of Dying is both a page-turner and difficult to read. A page-turner because it is a gripping account of an award-winning war reporter’s unexpected and stomach-turning brush with death in the seemingly safe environment of his New England home. And difficult, in various ways, owing to the necessary weight of its subject matter.

The first difficulty of which a prospective reader should be aware is that this book might not be for the medically squeamish. Junger is a very talented writer, whose unflinching descriptions of his sudden illness — a ruptured aneurysm — and subsequent emergency-room surgery are horribly vivid. He guides his reader through similarly arresting accounts of equally close calls, from his own near-drowning as a youthful surfer to heart-stopping narratives of the harrowing work of U.S. Army combat medics in Afghanistan. These are impressive stories, artfully told, but they are not light reading. You will gasp for breath with that desperate young surfer, and passages about emergency surgery leave you expecting your own hands to come away bloody from Junger’s somewhat gory book.

The second difficulty is the book’s deeper, and more rewarding, subject matter. Dying and death — they are, of course, not quite the same thing — are important topics to which most in the Western world pay only lip service. As a culture, we are less familiar with death, dying, and the dead than ever before.

This is not an uncomplicatedly bad thing. We are immensely lucky to live in a world that has been transfigured by the marvels of modern medicine and sanitation. The average citizen of the United States, Canada, Britain, or Europe is far less likely than his or her forebears to have been stalked by death in childhood, in childbirth, in hunger, or in war. Those of us who have seen some of these dangers in the wider world know to be grateful that our children are largely unmarked by such things.

Still, we could do with thinking about the subject, with allowing ourselves to be awed and frightened and unsettled by it. Junger’s book is excellent at jolting us out of a complacent attitude towards death. Partly because it recounts how suddenly a seemingly healthy adult — a strong, fit, and worldly-wise man — can find himself laid low by an almost fatal illness or injury. It is important to be reminded that this can and does happen, every day, all over the world, to people who aren’t expecting to be confronted by their own mortality.

But, perhaps even more challengingly, more controversially, because Junger is surprised by a seemingly immaterial or supernatural side to dying. The subtitle of his book puts it starkly: How I Came Face-to-Face with the Idea of an Afterlife.

It helps that Junger isn’t credulous. His book isn’t a piece of religious apologetics, and he doesn’t display the zeal of the convert. He is, instead, a wide-eyed observer of his own baffling experiences.

Central to his near-death experience was that Junger was startled by the sudden visible presence of his dead father during the emergency surgery to locate his aneurysm. Junger wasn’t unconscious. He was too weak for his surgeons to risk putting him under general anesthesia. Sliding in and out of lucidity, he was able to talk to the physicians around the operating table. And yet “there [my father] was, not so much floating as simply existing above me and slightly to my left.” Junger’s father “exuded reassurance and seemed to be inviting me to go with him.” Needless to say, this was somewhat confusing for the atheistic Junger.

In My Time of Dying explores these experiences in a broadly empiricist mode. The book is written in a clear and unpretentious prose style, and Junger shows his work with neat citations of medical research, near-death experiences, consciousness studies, and so on.

That these strange experiences occur seems empirically verifiable. Junger relates some famous testimonies of near-death out-of-body experiences and of visions of deceased family members. The 1991 brain-aneurysm surgery of a 35-year-old musician, Pam Reynolds, is a classic example. She reported both being able to hear surgeons discussing her operation while anesthetized, and encounters with dead relatives who encouraged her to return to her body. There are various possible explanations for this experience. Reynolds’s anesthesiologist suggested that she might have formed strange memories during “a period of semiconsciousness before and after anesthesia, during which she might have overheard the surgical team discussing the details of her surgery.”

Junger also discusses a more recent, and even more empirically verifiable, study in Estonia. In 2022, researchers at the University of Tartu were able to attach electrodes to the skull of a dying man and observe for the first time “the electrical activity of a dying human brain.” The result was a glimpse of the experience of death. “During the thirty seconds before and after death, the patient’s brain experienced a surge of gamma waves associated with memory retrieval, intense concentration, dissociative states, and dreaming.”

Similar patterns, Junger explains, have been observed in the brains of dying lab rats. He speculates — in a piece of perfectly sensible scientific reasoning — that this may be common to mammals in general, and that “the evolutionary advantage may simply lie in providing one last, compelling motivation to stay alive.” Compelling indeed.

Junger also writes thoughtfully about the strange emotional experience of having survived his own near-death experience. The heady mixture of fear and uncertainty, of weakness and an intense awareness that something similar could happen again; he even narrates a subsequent cancer scare.

Related topics come in for perspicacious treatment. Towards the end of the book, Junger zeroes in on the question of consciousness in our cosmos. There is currently something of a renaissance of philosophies that see consciousness not as a problem to be explained away by a materialist worldview but as a fundamental and basic feature of the universe we live in. Just in the last couple of years, the somewhat maverick British psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist has defended a consciousness-centered worldview in his magnum opus The Matter with Things, and the academic philosopher Philip Goff has written a fascinating popular account of a meaningful, consciousness-infused universe (without God, he argues!) titled Why? The Purpose of the Universe. Readers of Junger might be keen to read, side by side with his book, some of these disparate but engaging accounts of a reality characterized by consciousness.

Recalling his father’s death, Junger remembers puzzling through his personal philosophy of death during the following sleepless night. “The price of getting to love somebody is having to lose them.” And, likewise, “the price of getting to live is having to die.”

Consciousness, death, meaning, relationships, truth. These, I increasingly realize, are the bedrock of man’s understanding of himself in Western culture. With the decline of both religion and liberal education, we’ve been too willing to leave these questions to academic specialists.

The more I think about things (and the more I read authors such as the historian Tom Holland), the more I realize that Western culture — though not only Western culture — has been shaped by two particular deaths, as well as by the awareness of our own mortality that we all share. Both deaths have at the very least a blazing pedagogical value. Christ’s death illustrates the pure principle of dying (and therefore living) for others. And the death of Socrates, condemned by the Athenians for his philosophical inquiries, the principle of dying (and therefore living) for the truth.

These three, then, remain: the great principles of self-sacrifice and of truth-seeking, and the common cloth of mortality from which we’re all cut. Reading Junger’s fascinating book is like traveling through a landscape in which these things become clearer. It is a personal memoir, an investigation of consciousness and death, a meditation on life in the dark light of death, and a signpost guiding us towards a fresh consideration of what and whom we’re willing to live and die for.