In My Time of Dying

Those of you who have been following my reading journey will realise that there is no way I could ignore a book with this title. In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife is not written by a would-be medium or someone claiming psychic powers or the ability to commune with spirits. Sebastian Junger is a hard-nosed journalist, a war correspondent, who has had many encounters with death and near-death, his own and other people's. But the incident that inspired this book was a medical emergency, an abdominal aneurysm that very nearly killed him.

During the moments when Junger was hovering on the border between life and death, he saw something totally unexpected: his dead father, who was a rational, logical scientist and if anything even more hard-nosed than his son. Junger's blow-by-blow account of his medical experience is utterly gripping, and takes up the first half of the book. The second half is devoted to his struggle to understand why he might have seen his father, and takes him into the arcane reaches of quantum theory, the definition of consciousness, and others' accounts of their own near-death experiences, to conclude that perhaps consciousness is woven into the very fabric of the universe, and that we really do rejoin something larger than ourselves when we die. It's a controversial, but (to me) very appealing proposition. I'm certain there is more to reality than our puny brains can comprehend, and it's always seemed the height of arrogance to assume that we could.

Weirdly, just after reading In My Time of Dying, I read Paul Jennings' life story, Untwisted, in which he recounts his own near-death experience, when he saw a cavern filled with people eating and laughing and enjoying themselves, and was drawn to a tunnel that exuded feelings of bliss and tranquillity. He says he hopes when his time does come, that tunnel is still there. Jennings' mother also saw a vision of her sister at the moment of her death, half a world away. Junger argues that there might be biological reasons for many near-death phenomena, but the one that is most difficult to explain is these visions of the dead. I do wonder what is going on; maybe one day I'll find out.