In June 2020, Sebastian Junger, the author best known for his blockbuster book “The Perfect Storm,” experienced a life-threatening and profoundly altering experience: An artery in his pancreas ruptured, and he lost two-thirds of his blood before the ICU team at a Cape Cod hospital saved him. A nurse later told him it was a “miracle” that he survived.
While Junger, now 62, was barely conscious on the operating table, he had a vision of his late father consoling, as well as beckoning, him. The vision shook Junger but also fascinated him, sending him on an intellectual and spiritual quest to understand near-death experiences. He turned that reporting into a book: “In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face-to-Face With the Idea of an Afterlife.”
The slim volume includes much interesting research about near-death visions, which Junger found are both remarkably common and similar. A self-described rationalist, he finds himself wondering whether the afterlife — a word he dislikes — is real.
But the book is also a deeply personal rumination about life, death, and the choices we make each waking hour. In his case, many of those choices favored taking big risks in search of meaning. He becomes a surfer and is almost slapped into oblivion by a huge wave. He works as a tree cutter partly because of the adrenaline-rush danger of operating a chainsaw high above the ground. He becomes a war correspondent and is almost killed by a militia in Africa and sniper fire in Afghanistan. The list goes on.
I spoke to him recently inside his rustic farmhouse on Cape Cod about the book and his adventure-rich life. We sat at a picnic table in a screened porch that he built largely with his own hands using timbers salvaged from wrecked fishing boats. The place where he collapsed and nearly died was about 100 yards away.
We began by talking about how close he had come to dying and the vision he had. As a young doctor was inserting a needle into his jugular vein, Junger sensed an infinite void open beneath him — and was suddenly terrified that he was about to fall into it. Then his father, who had been dead eight years, appeared.
“And he said, ‘It’s OK. You don’t have to fight it. You can come with me. I’ll take care of you.’ I was like, ‘Come with you? You’re dead. Why would you imagine I want to go with you?’ . . . I said [to the doctor], ‘You’ve got to hurry, I’m going right now. You’re losing me.’ I was horrified.” Junger said.
When he returned home from the hospital a few days later, Junger said, the vision continued to trouble him.
“I started to worry that I hadn’t actually survived, that I died, and that my memories after seeing my dead father — what I thought were memories of the ER suite, and then the ICU, and then coming home with my wife on a hot June day and hugging my daughters and crying — that they were the hallucinations of a dying brain and they didn’t actually happen. That I’m not actually here, and maybe I’m a ghost. Maybe I’m actually imagining that when I say something to my daughter and she turns and answers, maybe I’m actually imagining. That I’m actually a ghost and I’m not interacting with them. It sounds too funny and silly, unless you think it might be possible, and then it’s the most terrifying thing you can imagine,” said Junger.
He began researching near-death experiences, which he calls NDEs, and learned many people have similar visions.
“Hospice nurses will say it’s incredibly common that the dying person, in their final days and hours, is actively in conversation with people in the room that no one else can see. Dead people, significant dead people, right in conversations like, ‘Oh, it’s so good to see you. Thank you for coming.’ It’s really, really common. It happened to my mother. It happened to my father,” Junger said.
He notes that many medical experts consider such visions the biologically induced hallucinations of a dying brain struggling with catastrophic stress. Calling himself a “dedicated rationalist,” Junger was inclined to believe such explanations. But something didn’t add up.
“Why do the dying have the same hallucination? Really, some could be hallucinating Ferris wheels and others unicorns, and others dolphins, and others dead people. Whatever, there should be the full range of crazy visuals. But no, they hallucinate dead people even when they don’t know they’re dying. And sometimes they hallucinate dead people that they didn’t know had died because that person had died recently. . . . Really begs an explanation, and there really, really aren’t good ones,” he said.
Though Junger had come close to death multiple times, this experience — so seemingly random, so unconnected to his own choices — traumatized him. In wrestling with it, he says he gained a new reverence for life.
“Almost dying is an incredibly frightening, dark experience. But what I came out of it with was the feeling that now death was sort of permanently perched on my shoulder, like this sort of hideous gargoyle. I was just not going to get rid of that. It was always there, and it had a profoundly demoralizing effect on me that made me unbearably anxious and frightened and eventually very depressed.
“What I eventually was able to do was use that awareness of death to appreciate the fact that I’m alive right now, which is something that when I was young, I didn’t know and a lot of young people don’t bother to do, they kind of take it for granted. . . . But if you don’t really incorporate that in your understanding of life, you won’t be sufficiently reverential of life, of the sheer miracle, the magic of this existence. And one of the things you get when you finally encounter death in the form that I did is that life suddenly achieves — if you can get past the anxiety and the depression, if you can get to the other side — what’s waiting for you is this sort of luminosity. It just glows like, ‘Oh my God, it’s all incredible.’ And that’s where I finally got,” Junger said.
We talked about how he covered wars in Afghanistan and Bosnia early in his career, in the mid-1990s, experiences he called “meaningful, essential, and ancient.” But what brought him fame was his first book, “The Perfect Storm,” about the death of six Gloucester fishermen during a massive nor’easter. When I asked how he decided to write that book, he said it began, oddly enough, with a conversation in a bar with a man who owned a tree-trimming company. But when it came full circle, the answer told me much about how Junger has lived his life.
“He pulled his pant leg up and he showed me this huge scar across his knee and he said, ‘I promise you, if you do this kind of work, you will, you will injure yourself, you will be cut by the saw. I just have to tell you that.’ I’m like, ‘All right, I’m good.’ And, so I started working as a climber for tree companies, and I was working, you know, 80, 90, 100 feet in the air, hanging on a rope with a running chainsaw, taking trees down in sections, topping out big white pines. That was my job, right? And it was absolutely intoxicating and paid well. And it was high-risk if you made a mistake. If you make the cut wrong and the top of the pine tree comes back on top of you, instead of falling the other way, that’s on you, you just didn’t do it right. Sorry. Game over. And so there was something about that I really liked.
“And, so, but of course, eventually I cut my leg with the chainsaw because I made a mistake. I tore up the back of my leg, and I was healing from it or limping around. I was living in the town of Gloucester with my girlfriend, and it was the fall of 1991, and this huge storm swept ashore, a storm like I’d never seen, enormous waves tearing the fronts off of houses. . . . A local boat sank with six men, a boat called the Andrea Gail out of Gloucester. And I was already thinking in my mind, like, all right, maybe I can write a book about dangerous jobs because I knew I didn’t want to do tree work my whole life. Maybe I can parlay this injury. It gave me the idea: Maybe I’ll write about dangerous jobs. . . . That eventually turned into a magazine piece, and a book proposal, and a book called ‘The Perfect Storm,’” said Junger.
I pointed out that the risky jobs, the war reporting, the daredevil experiences were part of a thread that seemed to tie his life together. Yet Junger says he’s not an adrenaline junkie but a “consequence seeker.” I asked him to explain the difference.
“I’m very careful in most situations,” he said. “I wear a seat belt. I drive the speed limit. I’m actually a pretty cautious person. One of the things I realized is that as humans, as an animal, we seek our own survival and we’re very good at it. But the other thing that we seek is meaning. And what I realized is that the situations that have great meaning have great consequences. Situations that have very low consequences, like, say, a game of golf, actually have very low levels of enduring meaning. And childbirth is extremely meaningful because the consequences are enormous. The stakes are life and death, right? Enormously painful, etc. Combat likewise. So that is when I realized what I was looking for.”
We closed by discussing his two young daughters and how they have changed his life as much as or more than work or nearly dying.
“I’ve been blessed, you know, as a young man with testosterone and now blessed as an older man with a nice lack of testosterone that allows me to lead a nice, quiet, peaceful, meaningful life with my family. And absolutely zero need to jeopardize that in any way whatsoever. And what a blessed relief. And having children is by far, by orders of magnitude, the most meaningful thing I’ve ever done,” he said.
Junger continued, “Someone asked me recently, what am I most proud of, and you know, I think they’re referring to my career. And I really thought about it because I’m very proud of my career. But then this image came to mind. My older daughter, who’s now 7, she can sometimes get into the state where she’s sort of emotionally deregulated and has kind of a fit. She just loses control. And it’s very, very scary for her. She can’t regulate herself. And I’m really good at picking her up and just holding her and talking to her really calmly and lovingly. And she clings to me like a little animal. Like a little marsupial. I can calm her down, you know, in seconds. It’s like a superpower. And the fact that I’m in a position to do that and that I’m able to do it, that I have whatever that skill is, that I can do that and help her through that moment is the thing I’m most proud of.”
James Dao can be reached at jim.dao@globe.com.