tselling author, today's guest has taken us to sea with an ill-fated fishing boat.

And as a documentarian, he showed us the reality of war in Afghanistan.

But his new book is his most intensely personal, a look at his own recent health crisis, the near-death experience it triggered, and how it shaped his views on an afterlife.

He's Sebastian Junger, this week on "Story in the Public Square".

(uplifting music) (uplifting music continues) Hello, and welcome to "Story in the Public Square", where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- And our guest this week is Sebastian Junger, one of this generation's great writers.

His new book is an intensely personal and gripping read, "In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife".

He joins us today from New York.

Sebastian, thank you so much for being with us.

- Hey, it's my pleasure.

Thank you.

- I mentioned this to you before we started, but the book was a gut punch for me.

It was incredibly powerful, really moving, and we're grateful to you for sharing some of it with us and for being with us here today.

For the audience who hasn't had a chance to read it yet, what is the story that starts this book in motion?

- Well, I was a war reporter for several decades and had a lot of close calls and finally stopped doing that, partly because I had a family and two young, two little girls.

And I didn't realize that you can leave the front lines, but they can come to you.

And one very peaceful, beautiful June day in 2020, in the middle of COVID, we were living in an old house deep in the woods in Massachusetts.

And my wife and I were at a little cabin that was even deeper in the woods, 'cause we had a little bit of babysitting time for our little girls.

In mid-sentence, I felt this bolt of pain shoot through my abdomen, and I didn't know it, but I was at, in one moment, I went from being a healthy 58-year-old man, athletic, to dying in one moment.

And I had an aneurysm, an undiagnosed aneurysm, a ballooning of a blood vessel in my abdomen, and it had finally ruptured.

It was a very rare thing.

It's a kind of freak thing.

And I was a human hourglass.

I was losing a pint of blood every 10 or 15 minutes, and I was rushed to the hospital.

It was a long transport.

It took me an hour to get to the hospital.

And on what really should've been my deathbed, they'd saved me by a miracle.

But what should have been my deathbed, I had some very, very strange visions, and I say that as an atheist, as a rationalist.

I woke up the next morning in the ICU completely puzzled and a little bit horrified by what I'd seen as I was dying.

- Well, I really, I cannot overstate the power of your writing in this book.

Very early on, page six, you write, "Everyone has a relationship with death whether they want one or not."

Prior to this event, what was your relationship with death?

- Well, I was an athlete in college.

I've been athletic my whole life.

I'm blessed with great health, and so I never thought that I was at risk of dying from a heart attack, or whatever drops middle-aged men in their tracks, right?

And so, the risks that I took as an arborist, I was a high climber for tree companies for when I was a young man, and then as a war reporter, those risks were voluntary and calculated.

And I was good.

I felt I was good at managing those risks.

And I had plenty of close calls.

I had a bullet hit a few inches from my forehead into a sandbag.

I was blown up by an IED.

I've had people say that they were gonna execute me.

But I got home unscathed.

And so, my relationship with death was one of sort of calculated risk, but without really taking it seriously.

And again, I'm not religious.

I don't believe in God.

I just don't think, I wouldn't, I just didn't think about it much, and I was able to hit age 58 without thinking about it much.

I've lost a couple of close friends, but that's different than one's own death.

And so, suddenly, the stakes of the game that we're all in were made clear to me very suddenly on a beautiful June afternoon in 2020.

- You talked about being a war correspondent, and during that time, and it was, you were embedded with a platoon in Afghanistan.

You saw people die.

You were in harm's way.

So, you had a different understanding of death than most people who have not been in combat or been there do.

How do you think most people who have not had that kind of very intimate up-front experience view death?

And I realize that it is probably a long answer, here, but talk about that, just sort of the general public.

They might have seen a relative die or had a relative die, or a friend or something, but nothing like what you had.

So, talk about that.

- Yeah, well, I'm very fortunate, unlike my colleague Tim Hetherington, I'm very fortunate to have not seen an American soldier die in combat.

I covered a lot of wars.

I didn't come to the US military as a journalist until quite late in my career.

I was in the civil wars in West Africa, in Bosnia in 1993.

And I've seen many people who were dead, right?

I mean, who had been dead months, weeks, hours, minutes, all presenting a a very different and horrifying vision of what death is.

And if you look at someone who's been dead in the tropics for several weeks, it's hard to imagine that there's anything after death.

I mean, when you see someone's remains after several weeks in the tropics, you just, it's hard not to think we're animals and we decompose like animals, and that's the end of that.

So, I think people's visions of death are split pretty cleanly between people who are religious and believe that there's an afterlife, that God, who created us, bestows on us an afterlife.

And then, atheists and maybe agnostics and rationalists, scientists who think we're biological beings, we're animals, we're social primates.

When chimpanzees die, they don't go to chimpanzee heaven.

They're just dead and they return to being part of the forest floor, and likewise for humans.

And that latter view was always the one that I held, as did my father, who was a physicist and a rationalist.

He had some vague idea of maybe there's some kind of soul, but he really understood the soul in subatomic quantum terms, rather than mystical and religious terms.

- You write about the randomness of who dies and who lives and when they die and when they live.

What were some of the random things that happened to you that could have been different that, you talked about the aneurysm?

- Well, one of the things about combat is that you can be very careful, but that you're spinning the roulette wheel.

A bullet hit a few inches from my head shot from, the shooter was maybe 500 meters away, 500 yards away.

So, you can imagine how small the angle was that saved my life, and had it hit my forehead, I wouldn't have even known that I died.

I would just stop existing.

But on the day that my aneurysm ruptured, it really terrified me later to think how easily it could've turned out differently.

I was gonna go running that afternoon.

I run every day, and I was like, "Maybe I'll just, we have babysitters.

Maybe I'll just relax with my wife a little bit.

We almost never get the chance to do that."

And so, it was a, had I gone running, I would've died crawling around in the woods trying to drag myself home.

- Wow.

- As soon as I started bleeding into my abdomen, I couldn't stand up.

I would've died in the woods.

It might've taken them days to find me.

I run on game trails in the pretty wild area.

And had there been traffic, I mean, had the doctors who saved me, who were really quite brilliant.

They were called in from the dinner table to come help me.

Had one of them been on vacation, I would've died.

I mean, it's just, and it was a one hour transport to the hospital.

I mean, my odds of living, at their best, were 30%, and with a transport like that, they were vanishingly small.

I mean, the ICU nurse the next morning said, "You almost died yesterday."

Of course, I had no idea that I'd almost died.

"You almost died yesterday.

In fact, no one can believe you made it.

It's a miracle."

- How do you not dwell on that after the fact?

Or did you?

You hint at some of this in the book, but how does that affect you when you get to the other side of it?

- Oh, I obsessed over it.

I mean, I remember after I was blown up by an IED in Afghanistan and the bomb went off under the engine block instead of under the crew compartment, and which spared us injury or death, I don't know quite what would've happened, but it would've been unpleasant.

And so, for days, I obsessed about, like, 10 feet.

I mean, like, "Maybe I, should I sit here, or should I sit there?"

I mean, you can drive yourself crazy.

And after I came back from the ICU, that's exactly what I did.

And I started to get into this very strange state of mind.

A day prior to almost dying, I had a very strange dream that I had died and that I was a spirit.

In my dream, I was a spirit and I was hovering over my family and they were grieving, and I was trying to communicate with them and they couldn't hear me.

And I was made to understand that I had already crossed over, I was dead.

And that was it.

And I was anguished.

I mean, my anguish woke me up.

And then I was lying, we co-sleep, so it's a big family bed.

I woke up next to my daughter, and I was like, "Oh, thank God, that was just a dream."

36 hours later, I, in fact, was dying.

So, when I got back from the ICU, at home, I was seized with this terror that maybe I had died, that my dream was the experience of dying and was real.

And that all that followed, the emergency room and coming back from the ICU and everything that followed was actually a dying hallucination.

And I actually wasn't alive, or that I was a ghost, and I just imagined that my children could see me, but I was deluding myself.

And at one point, I went to my wife and I said, "Just tell me I'm alive.

Tell me I'm really here."

And she said, "Honey, of course you're here.

You're fine, you're safe."

But in my mind, I thought, "That's exactly the kind of thing that a hallucination would say."

And so, I really, yes, I obsessed over it.

It took me a long time, and frankly, a little bit of therapy to climb out of that epistemological pit and trust that I actually am alive, I'm here, and that all of this actually has meaning and is happening.

- I wanna go back to the night after you get to the emergency room.

At what point did you know that you were in trouble?

- I never knew.

I never knew I was in trouble.

We got to the ER.

I was bleeding out into my own abdomen.

If I'd been stabbed, if someone had stabbed me with a knife, I would've been better off because the doctors would've known exactly where to put their finger to plug the leak, as it were, right?

- Right.

The problem with internal hemorrhage is that your abdomen is basically a big bowl of spaghetti and you're bleeding out into it, they don't know where the bleed is.

And if they have to just open you up and start rooting around in your abdominal organs looking for the bleed, at that point, the trauma of an emergency laparotomy is so tremendous that your odds of surviving are quite low.

So, I was there in the ER and I had no idea I was dying, thank God.

And the doctor said to me, "Do I have permission to put a needle into your jugular, like, through your neck, into your jugular to transfuse you?"

And it didn't sound very nice.

And I said, "You mean in case there's an emergency?"

And he said, "This is the emergency, right now."

And so, I said, of course I said yes.

And then, shortly after that, this black pit opened up underneath me, this infinitely black pit opened up underneath me and started pulling me in.

And I was panicked.

I was like a wounded animal.

I didn't know I was dying, but I didn't wanna go into the pit.

And then, my dead father appeared above me and said, "It's okay.

I'll take care of you.

You don't have to fight it.

You can come with me."

And I was like, "Come with you?

You're dead, I'm not going anywhere with you!

We have nothing to talk about."

And I said to the doctor, 'cause I'm still conversant, I'm still conscious.

I said to the doctor, "You have to hurry, you're losing me right now.

I'm going."

I didn't know where I was going, but I knew I was going somewhere very, very grim.

So, I didn't know until the next morning when the nurse told me in the ICU that I'd almost died.

I had no idea what the stakes were.

- Sebastian, go back to that moment when they're working on you feverishly, and at one point, it was either a nurse or a doctor said, "He's only got 10 or 15 more minutes and then he's going to be dead."

And your father appeared.

Give us a little more detail about what he said and what that meant.

And then tell us about him, 'cause he was a fascinating person.

- Yep.

So, he was a- - And he was dead, by the way, when he appeared.

I think we need to make that clear.

- Yes, my father who'd been dead eight years appeared above me.

And he appeared above me in a, it wasn't like he was a cardboard cutout of my father hovering above me.

He was like in a, it's hard to explain, but it was like he, there was a kind of energy that was in the form of my father and he communicated without speech.

It was, but we somehow communicated.

But my mind was pretty addled.

I'd lost two thirds of my blood.

My blood pressure was 60 over 40.

And it was later, when I interviewed my doctor, I interviewed all the medical personnel who would agree to an interview about what they were doing to save me, because my memories, of course, are so weird.

He said, "Yeah, you were probably 10 or 15 minutes away from cardiac arrest."

So, my father suddenly is there and I'm shocked to see him.

And he basically was there to comfort me and to say, "It's okay.

I'll take care of you.

You can come with me to the other side."

I didn't know what the other side was.

I just, but I wanted nothing to do with any of it.

And later, I found out that that vision of a dead relative, a dead loved one appearing above you to comfort you and escort you is a classic experience that many, many dying people have had and it's part of a sort of category of experience called NDEs, near-death experiences.

So, when I researched this later, I was shocked, 'cause I knew nothing about any of this.

Both the dream I'd had prior and the experience that I'd had in the trauma bay as they were transfusing me with blood, that those experiences were identical to the experiences of many, many people, hundreds, thousands of people who have almost died and been resuscitated and come back to report strange experiences.

And that's where my journalistic curiosity was aroused.

Like, wow, how strange that we're all having the same experience.

Does this mean there's a, quote, afterlife, or is this just the hallucinations of a dying brain, you can explain it perfectly well through neurochemistry?

- Well, I think that, for me, was one of the more powerful moments in the book because you walk us through what physically happens to the body, what the physiological responses, what's happening in the brain as death approaches.

But you make it perfectly clear that you could explain a lot of the phenomena, but you can't explain the other dead people.

- Yeah.

There are a number of wonderful scientists and doctors who have researched NDEs and come to the conclusion that, you know what?

This does give us a little bit of a reason to think there may be a, quote, afterlife.

Now, I always say, quote, afterlife because I don't even know what people quite mean by that.

The term itself is a kind of semantic contradiction.

I'm not comfortable with it.

But that's the suggestion in a lot of research papers.

And then, other scientists, the naysayers, as it were, is like, "Nonsense!

You can explain all this through neurochemistry, epileptic seizures will reproduce some of these same phenomena."

There's all kinds of rational scientific explanations that don't lead to a conclusion of an afterlife.

And so, and as a rationalist, I'm sort of with the scientists.

I'm like: Okay, you guys are right.

We can all hope that there's an afterlife and we can all float happily on after we die and enjoy that, et cetera, but that doesn't make much sense, and neurochemistry explains all of it, except for one thing.

We know that if you give a room full of people LSD, they will all have hallucinations.

We know the neurochemistry behind that.

There's no mystery.

But they will not all hallucinate the same thing.

And what's very strange about people that almost die, and the dying, insofar as they utter their experiences to their caretakers, they all have the same experiences, which the dying seem to see the dead and no one else in the room can see them.

And if you talk to hospice nurses, this is a very, very common experience.

In the last days and hours, the dying will have conversations with the dead.

They've clearly shown up, like my father did, to sort of help with the great crossing into the hereafter.

And so, that's where, in my mind, it doesn't, to me, it doesn't mean that there's a God.

But it means there may be something about the nature of reality, of consciousness, of the universe, of how things work at the subatomic quantum level.

There may be something about that level of existence that we just do not understand.

And in the book, I say we may understand reality in the way a dog understands a TV screen.

They think they're looking and watching something, but actually, the wider context that produces those images that we take for reality is utterly beyond our understanding.

And we just don't know.

- Wow.

Powerful.

Another aspect of many near-death experiences is what is described as a life review, and you write about a life review as part of what you were talking about earlier.

What is a life review, as opposed to seeing people who have already died welcoming you to wherever you're going?

- Yeah, so one of the common experiences in NDEs is that the person, the dying person leaves their body and feels like they're hovering over the surgeons and the trauma team, the whoever's trying to save them.

Is hovering over them.

And so, there's this sort of like, there's this sort of remove, and where the doctors, of course, are seeing the end of a life.

But what the patient experiences isn't the end of something, but a kind of infinite expansion.

And they're like, "Wait, don't make me go back into that little body.

I'm now part of the universe."

And along with that infinite expansion comes a kind of universal knowledge, a knowledge of all things.

And that often includes a life review, which is that you can experience your entire life from birth to right now as you die in one enormous present moment.

You can hold them, all the experiences you've ever had, in your mind simultaneously.

And it's a very common experience or illusion, however you wanna, whatever side of the divide you wanna put yourself on.

And one extraordinary case that I found, a young man who I interviewed who was a combat vet.

He was in the US military and he bled out, basically bled out like I did, on the battlefield.

And he said that he suddenly had this feeling of seeing his entire life in one moment, and an overwhelming sense of love and peacefulness.

That wasn't my experience, but that was a life review, and it's one of the most powerful, and frankly, one of the most comforting experiences that dying people report in that sort of threshold state.

- Sebastian, the book on one level operates as almost a meditation, on the relationship between the incredible achievements of science and rationality, and yet, its inability to still explain some of those fundamental questions about human existence.

And, you know, I know that you're a self-described atheist, but it yields, I think, even in your writing, to some spiritual questions.

And I'm curious, now, how you reconcile that rationality with your own experience now, with the hindsight of experience.

- Well, yeah.

I mean, we use the word spiritual for things we don't understand scientifically.

And so, for me, the spiritual questions are just the unanswered scientific questions around our existence and around life and consciousness and the origins of the universe.

I mean, scientists can explain what happened during what's called the Big Bang, the initial pulse of energy that created the entire universe, which went, I should say, the universe went from nothing to hundreds of millions of light years across in an amount of time that's too small to measure, okay?

So, rational inquiry can describe an awful lot of that, but not how and why it happened in the first place, 'cause the entire universe came out of nothing.

So, that's where you start to get into what we call spiritual.

But my father was a physicist.

He was involved in the branch of physics called acoustics, but it's adjacent to the more mysterious forms of physics, say, at the quantum, quantum physics, quantum mechanics, and the great quantum physicists of from around a hundred years ago, Einstein and Schrodinger and Heisenberg and Niels Bohr, et cetera, de Broglie.

What they found at the quantum level was that the universe worked in ways that matter, subatomic particles worked in ways that make no sense for the macroscopic world that we live in.

For example, a particle can be in two places at the same time.

Impossible for us to walk through two doorways at the same time, but a photon can go through two slits simultaneously if you don't observe, if humans don't observe it.

And as soon as you observe it, the photon has to pick one slit.

It's called the double-slit experiment.

It makes no sense at all.

And so, what I say in the book, and there's been a lot of theorizing around this, that the enigma, the enigma of reality at the quantum level may be associated with some kind of explanation about what happens after we die, that there is some post-death existence at the quantum level that we do not or cannot understand that might explain some of this, quote, spiritual stuff, mystical stuff.

But in fact, it's just, it's a level of physics that is just, that a human brain is not capable of understanding.

Again, the dog staring at the television screen.

- Your author's note at the end of the book is a plea for people to give blood, and we've got about a minute left.

Why did you put that there?

I guess it's probably obvious.

Why is it important for people who can to give blood?

And I would note that you now, three or four times a year, give blood.

- Yeah, I'm a member, a proud member of the One Gallon Club.

I've given a gallon of blood so far, and so I give as much as I can.

They allow you to give every few months.

My little girls, who are now seven and four, they have a father because 10 anonymous blood donors gave a unit of blood, a pint of blood.

And I hadn't, I've known people who gave blood before.

I never thought about it much.

And then, after my life was saved by these good people, the light bulb went off.

Doctors can't make blood.

And if you give blood, your body replaces it in a week or two.

It's the ultimate free lunch, as Christopher Hitchens, the great writer and philosopher, was fond of saying.

So, if you're part of society, which you are, if you're part of the human race, which you are, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, you don't owe the country, you don't owe society nothing.

And I would say you owe it some blood, because one day, you're gonna be me.

You're gonna be on that gurney, or your child will be, or your spouse, or somebody is gonna be in a trauma bay and they're gonna die if there's no blood available.

So, give blood.

And the great thing about it is that it makes you feel good.

To be part of something greater than yourself is an enormous thrill.

And along with voting and and serving in jury duty, those are the three things, and donating blood.

Those are the three things that your nation needs you to do.

You don't have to do them, but you know what?

If you don't do them, then you don't deserve the benefits of other people doing them.

So, please go out and donate blood.

- And folks, if they wanna know how to do it, they can go to redcross.org and find a place to donate blood today.

Hey, Sebastian Junger, this is a tremendous piece of work.

Thank you so much for sharing it with us and thank you for spending some time with us today.

That is all the time we have this week, but if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square", you can find us on social media or visit pellcenter.org, where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

He's Wayne, I'm Jim, asking you to join us again next time for More "Story in the Public Square".

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