If you spot a man happily playing the accordion on a bench in New York City's Tompkins Square Park, there's no need to toss him a tip. Sebastian Junger is doing just fine now, four years after the award-winning bestselling author and documentary film producer was nearly felled by a ruptured aneurysm in a pancreatic artery.
It was hardly his first narrow escape. Wounding his leg with a chainsaw in his 20s didn't kill him. Decades of near misses on battlefields immersed in the dangers of combat to write about those who did—or did not— survive didn't kill him. He's written about the world's most terrifying moments on sea (The Perfect Storm year), and land (War, 2010) and coproduced the Sundance Grand Prize-winning combat documentary Restrepo, outliving his collaborator and with a close friend, photojournalist Tim Hetherington, who was later killed in Libya.
Now, Junger himself is the central figure of In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face-to-Face with the Idea of Dying (Simon & Schuster, May). What he "saw," as his brain nearly shut down while teams of physicians sought to stem the rupture, was the face of his father, Miguel Junger, who had died eight years earlier. In the book, he writes that Miguel, a physicist, a rationalist, an atheist, "seemed to be inviting me to go with him. 'It's okay, there's nothing to be scared of,' he seemed to be saying. 'Don't fight it. I'll take care of you."
Still, he fights. And, finding himself alive, he turns, as he has always done, to unearth and attempt to document, every detail of the experience: The exact scalpel in a doctor's hand. The line of discovery in physics down to the quantum level of exploring existence. Studies of near-death visions reported in religions and cultures around the world. Ideas on the nature and limits, if any, of consciousness.
PW talked with Junger about his life after the aneurysm and his ideas of the "afterlife."
In almost all your books people —and now you — are either killed or in mortal danger. Why are you drawn to these kinds of stories?
They all involve the highest stakes, It's true. I think we're all drawn to this. If you look at Hollywood movies, you look at novels, you look at myths and fairy tales, the stakes are all very high. Humans are focused on birth and love and survival and death, as they should be.
A key moment in your book is when, near death, you had a vision of your late father. Was this just prompted by the electrical impulses of a dying brain? A hallucination?
Oh, that's definitely one of the theories. I honestly don't have an opinion. I found neurochemical explanations very, very compelling—with one exception. Only dying people have this same category of hallucination. If you give a roomful of people LSD, they all have different visions. But when people are dying, a puzzling amount of the time they see the dead—-even people they did not know were dead. It's a great mystery. I can't presume to know or to be able to explain it. But in my book, I wanted to set out the terms of the inquiry in at least a clear enough way that people can at least understand what we're asking about.
According to your book, your father was a devoted rationalist who nevertheless believed humans have souls. What did he mean by "soul?" Do you think he believed in an afterlife?
Yes, of course, on the biological level there is an "afterlife." You know you're going to decompose and turn into a vegetable garden eventually, or a weed. I'm guessing my father felt there could be some sort of one in an insubstantial way, and that after your brief sojourn on Earth, you're rejoined into the quantum mass of the universe. I'm sure he didn't believe in a post-death consciousness.
Do you? When I asked you about the idea of a personal "afterlife," an eternal consciousness, you sounded horrified.
I could barely make it through math class in high school for 50-60 minutes! The idea of being conscious for eternity seems absolutely appalling, like a kind of hell. And if you're conscious with pain? Imagine being conscious with unbearable pain for eternity. Are you kidding? So, I hope I'm right, that there is no consciousness after death.
What happened to me made me realize that we just don't know. I have some humility about scientific understanding, empirical understanding. Everything that we understand, and the means by which we understand, about the central mystery of existence has not been adequately explained. The universe might work at a quantum level so complex that it's beyond our understanding. And the "secret" about death is contained in that realm. Who knows what would happen on the physical level if the human mind understood everything there is to understand about the mystery of existence. This seems like sort of dangerous territory to interrogate God, metaphorically speaking. And maybe that's not the smartest thing for us puny little humans to be doing.
Let's talk about God. Was this a religious experience for you?
I've been a stone-cold atheist my whole life. I still am. I don't believe in God but that doesn't mean there isn't one. I think religious traditions possibly reflect something real in their own subjective way. There's also an enormous amount of beauty and poetry and interesting language, in religious scripture. So, I'm happy to pillage that as well because I find it beautiful and moving. But I still don't believe in God.
The first two years after your brush with death were very hard. Your book describes moments of great joy and deep fear and times of feeling very present. How are you feeling now?
I had a classic post-medical trauma reaction. It's very, very common. I had a sort of unbearable anxiety. that at any given moment, some other aneurysm I didn't know about could rupture and I'd be dying on the on the living room floor. But now I have gotten over the irrational fear. And I am enjoying moments more intensely. I'm an older father. I'm 62. My oldest daughter is six and the other one is four. I have an awareness of mortality that many younger parents might not have. In moments of extreme frustration, it's way easier for me to say, "You know what? You're just lucky to be here. You're caught in traffic on the Cross Bronx Expressway, during a heat wave with a broken AC and two children in the back of the car. It's not the greatest moment but you're alive! They're alive! So, grow up. Get over it."
You say you're not working on a new book, yet, but rather enjoying your family and the pleasures of running, boxing, and playing music. What do you play?
I love the accordion. It's in every musical tradition I adore and I'm always very moved by it. I just love practicing and mastering music. And because I didn't start as a musician. I'm just stunned whenever a song sort of gives up her secrets and allows me to play it. It's like, you know, the girl you have a crush on talking to you when you are 14 and your; like, 'Are you kidding? You're talking to me?!' That's what that's what being able to play a beautiful piece of music feels like to me. I bring my accordion to gatherings, dinners, and parties with friends. I live near Tompkins Square Park and I sit on a park bench and play music for people and, you know, they stop and listen, or they don't. Whatever. I'm happy.
