Book review: Celebrated American author, war correspondent and documentary film-maker Sebastian Junger’s extraordinary life can be divided into dramatic acts like a great Shakespearean history play. His latest book is the epilogue to his third act.
Act One features our hero, a devilishly handsome young author with hooded eyes and an aloof demeanour, hunkering down to research and write The Perfect Storm, about the swordfish fishermen of the Andrea Gail, which, in October 1991, got caught off the coast of Nova Scotia in the storm of the century. The book is a commercial success and becomes the basis of a blockbuster motion picture.
At the end of Act One, Junger defies expectation, turning away from the congenial world of cinematic fame for the adrenalin of the battlefield. He becomes a war correspondent embedded with American troops in the forever wars in Afghanistan and Syria.
Act Two begins with Junger and the photographer Tim Hetherington becoming documentarians, filming American troops stationed in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, then billed as the most dangerous front in that treacherous frontier. A few years later, Hetherington goes off to cover the civil war in Libya. At the last minute, Junger pulls out of the assignment and Hetherington travels alone to the besieged city of Misrata, arriving in the morning and by noon being subject to crossfire. “Tim took a small piece of metal to his groin – apparently big enough to sever an artery … The last thing he said was ‘please help me’ … Did Tim know he was dying? Was he scared?”
Returning to New York after Tim’s London funeral, Junger finds himself in the throes of a deep depression. “Things unravelled quickly after that. My first marriage ended. My father died. The best man at my wedding rented a car, drove to a sporting goods store, bought a shotgun and ended his life in a parking lot.” He goes on to say, with hopeful consternation, “… that the randomness that can kill you will also save you. One night, I was in a crowded New York bar and glimpsed a woman who seemed inexplicably familiar … we had never met – but I was overcome by the feeling I knew her. Later, she told me that she had experienced the same thing.”
That woman’s name is Barbara. Act Three begins with a wedding, and at age 55, Junger (now 62) finds himself the father of one girl and then another. They live on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and in an old house in the Massachusetts woods. Junger shuns the spotlight and writes taut non-fiction narratives, War, Tribe and Freedom, which meditate on the bonds soldiers form in combat and their experiences coming home. Junger, Barbara and their two young daughters eventually retreat full time to their bucolic farmstead, far from the world’s tumults and, unfortunately, from hospitals.
Junger writes, “The pain in my abdomen arrived without fanfare one September morning when my eldest girl was two and a half and the household was busy with a rolling series of tasks that would never quite get done … This is the kind of pain where you later find out that you’re going to die.”
What follows is a raw, breathtaking and sobering account of Junger’s literal race from death. It turns out he had a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm, a “triple A”, as it is known. Most are diagnosed only post-mortem. In My Time of Dying reports the race in all its gruesome detail, including descriptions of all the advances in modern medicine that contributed to his miraculous survival.
What inspired this book, though, is what happened when Junger was in the operating room near death: the Shakespeare-like appearance of his father’s ghost.
“I became aware of a dark pit below me and to my left. The pit was the purest black and so infinitely deep that it had no depth at all … It exerted a pull that was slow but unanswerable, and I knew that if I went into the hole, I was never coming back.” Just then, “I became aware of something else. My father. He’d been dead eight years, but there he was, not so much floating as existing above me and slightly to my left … [he] exuded reassurance. ‘It’s okay, there’s nothing to be scared of … Don’t fight it. I’ll take care of you.’”
Junger recounts his confusion. His father had been a scientist – an atheist, like himself. Though Junger didn’t know he was dying, the “invitation to join him seemed grotesque”. He told his doctor to hurry, he was going. “And that was the last thing I remembered for a very long time.”
The epilogue of In My Time of Dying is Junger’s attempt to explain this near-death experience. After running to the front lines for so long, the front lines had come to him. Though he never does have a “come to Jesus” moment, he accepts that the appearance of the ghost of a loved one, beckoning to join him, is the only commonality of all near-death experiences across all cultures. The next day, a nurse in the ICU tells him that no one can believe he is alive. Relating his terror to her, she calmly responds, “Instead of thinking of it as something scary, try thinking of it as something sacred.”
And so Junger navigates the aftermath of his “death” as if wandering through an Earthly purgatory. There is renewed appreciation of life, but also an eternal questioning that has no resolution. What does it all mean? We all live to die, but how do we wrestle with that inevitable transition? As with all great storytellers, this tale, reinforced by both the facts of science and the mysteries of the unknown, is utterly compelling. In My Time of Dying does not tell us what to believe, but it does ask us to behold the mysteries of the unknown as truly sacred.
In My Time Of Dying: How I came face to face with the idea of an afterlife by Sebastian Junger (Fourth Estate, $36.99) is out now.
