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Sebastian Junger writes about life and death. From war zones to wildfires, he often finds himself observing the fragility of life up close. He spent a year embedded with U.S. forces in Afghanistan, which led to Restrepo, a documentary named after a fort named after a slain American medic. His most famous book, The Perfect Storm, tells the story of a Massachusetts fisherman caught in a brutal storm off the coast of Nova Scotia. It was turned into a movie starring George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg.
Junger’s newest book, In My Time of Dying, is the latest instalment in his line of work touching upon human belonging in modern societies. However, unlike much of his earlier works, Junger’s newest is based on a first-hand intimate experience: an almost lethal ruptured aneurysm. Rushed into surgery, Junger began hallucinating on the operating table, seeing his deceased father and experiencing an enveloping sense of inner calm. The experience was jarring, but it clarified for Junger, even in those chaotic moments on the threshold of death, his desire to live.
Unflinchingly atheistic, the near-death experience (NDE) prompted Junger to confront concepts which previously felt distant and ephemeral: the afterlife, mortality and fatherhood. National Post’s Ari Blaff spoke to Junger about how his brush with death has changed how he looks at life. This conversation has been slightly edited for length and clarity.
Do you feel that there’s a throughline connecting your recent series of books?
I mean, they’re all about how we experience our lives as human beings.
We’re all social primates, so we are fundamentally communal creatures. And when we are alone, we either die, or we suffer psychologically. We are also creatures that place a very, very, high value on freedom.
Chimpanzees are hierarchical. There’s an alpha male that runs the show. They use beatings and coercion to get cooperation. And dogs, likewise, you know, they’re sort of a packed structure. Everyone’s quite happy.
That’s not humans, right? Abuse of authority is extremely traumatic to people.
And then finally we die, you know? We live these rich lives, these profound lives, knowing that — at some point — the show’s over. Utterly and completely. As if it never happened. So those three things characterize humans in ways that other mammals don’t really experience their lives, their existence like that. So, yes, that’s what ties them together is this fundamental experience of being humans in the natural world.
Do you look back on your life differently following your near-death experience?
Well, you know, in your early thirties and forties, you can imagine, intellectually, that life doesn’t go on forever, but you live each day as if it does. And now I’m older, I have children, and I can sort of feel the boundaries. When you’re twenty, you can feel your childhood: it’s right behind you. You know, my childhood is a completely abstract thing now. I mean, it’s way, way, way off in the distance. But what I can feel is the other end. And so that change hasn’t happened in the last few months. It’s happened in the last decade.
How do you feel major events, like the pandemic or global conflict, affect how people look at the afterlife?
Well, you know, everyone knows that they die, right?
I mean, and humans seem to have come up with this sort of like lovely story: ‘Yes, we die, but there’s a god and an afterlife, and he’ll take care of us and there’s nothing to worry.’ So there’s nothing to see here. Like there’s nothing to worry about. It only gets better. Death is scary but the truth is it only gets better because then you’re in an afterlife that’s devoid of suffering and pain and you’re cradled in god’s arms and everything’s lovely. I don’t hold that belief myself, but I think that’s what humanity has done with the stark reality of death.
Every society believes in some version of that sweet story. And I’m not sure that COVID changed that particularly, you know. I think humans just continue believing that and even people that are religious — there’s a new term ‘I’m spiritual, I’m mystical,’ which is, in my opinion, a bogus grey zone. Like, ‘Well, I don’t believe. I’m not religious. But, I think there’s something more.’
Well, that’s religious, right? I mean, you’re still thinking in religious ways, which is fine. I mean, it doesn’t matter to me. But there really is a binary: either there’s something more, or there’s nothing more. The sort of grey area, I don’t buy for a second.
How do you feel that becoming a father has impacted your view of near-death experiences?
Well, it made my brush with death absolutely excruciating to think about, because dying, other than the sort of natural fear that most people would have about dying, I also had this sort of anguishing knowledge that I almost effectively abandoned my family and my wife.
I’d just become a father. I mean, this tremendous blessing in my mid-fifties. There’s a series of misfortunes and errors and et cetera in my life, and in my choices, you know, and it worked. I finally did it!
And then it was just as I sort of thought I’d slid in at home plate, it was all but wrenched away from me. And what it would’ve done to them was unbearable to think about. So it affected me enormously, and now my interest in living a good, long, healthy life is rooted, not exclusively, but almost exclusively, in wanting to be there for my girls and able to enjoy this part of my life.
This is my reward for having lived the life I’ve lived. Now, here I am, and I get, it’s the most lovely thing I could ever imagine. This is the only reason, really, that I want to live to, 105, right?
Like, otherwise, really? Do we have to go through this whole thing? But that is why. If I can do that, and be physically and cognitively pretty viable, absolutely, sign me up! Because that means my oldest girl will be 50 years old when I pass. Like, oh, hallelujah! I’ll be a granddad. So it absolutely affected everything.