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.
Sebastian Junger talks near-death experience in new book "In My Time of Dying"