How Near-Death Experience Changes Life

Thank you so much. It’s an honor to be here.

I was supposed to die at about 8:00 p.m. on June 16, 2020. I headed toward that moment, and I’m here to talk, in part, about how complicated it is to dodge your fate.

I always thought death was very dramatic because I was a war reporter for almost 20 years. I was blown up in a Humvee by a roadside bomb. It went off under the engine block instead of under us, so we survived.

I was in firefights where bullets hit sandbags so close to my head that they kicked sand into the side of my face. Just inches.

I was seized by a shadowy group called the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta. They were MEND warriors in the creeks of the delta. They thought I was a spy, and one guy came up to me with a machine gun and introduced himself by saying, “When we kill you later, I’ll be the one to do it.”

I just remember thinking, “Don’t let your knees buckle. Stay standing.”

I did.

I got out of the business of war. I turned away from the drama and the meaningfulness and the violence, the excitement and the horror, and I turned toward life.

I stopped war reporting. I got married. I had a family. I had two little girls quite late in life. I was in my 50s.

And that was when I found out the truly terrifying thing about death, which is how casual it can be. Almost an afterthought. How mundane.

Oh, you were scheduled to die today? Delete.

It’s like that.

So this was during COVID. My family and I moved from New York, where we live, to Massachusetts. We were in an old house deep in the woods at the end of a dead-end dirt road. There was no cell phone service. The landlines were so old that when it rained, they shorted out and didn’t work.

In other words, it was paradise.

One afternoon, we got a call from some teenage girls who lived up the road. We knew the family. They asked if we would like some babysitting.

Of course, we said yes.

They came over. My girls were three years old and six months old at the time. My wife, Barbara, and I went down this little path into the woods to a cabin I had built overlooking a small lake. Completely off the grid. The most beautiful place on the planet.

And in this place of beauty and tranquility and intimacy and peace is where I found out.

I felt an odd pain in my abdomen. I’m a healthy person. I’m not a walking heart attack. I didn’t think much about it.

But it wouldn’t go away.

I stood up to try to work it out, and the floor went reeling away from me. I sat back down and said, “I think I’m going to need help.”

I didn’t know what was happening.

I had an undiagnosed aneurysm in my pancreatic artery, something incredibly rare and incredibly deadly. An aneurysm is an unnatural ballooning of the arterial wall. It grows very gradually throughout your life, over decades. It is very hard to detect and asymptomatic.

Eventually, it reaches a critical point and ruptures. Then you start bleeding into your own abdomen.

I was losing a pint of blood every 10 or 15 minutes. There are about 10 pints of blood in the human body. You can lose about half of that before you die.

And we lived an hour from the hospital.

I was literally a human hourglass.

I put one hand over my wife’s shoulder. She put an arm around my waist and dragged me out of the woods, down the path, and into the driveway. She put me in the passenger seat of the car, ran inside, grabbed one of the babysitters, and said, “Something’s wrong with Sebastian. Call the ambulance.”

The landlines were out because it had been raining.

The babysitter took her cell phone and walked around the driveway until she found one bar of signal. One bar. She called the ambulance.

Meanwhile, my wife was kneeling beside me, holding my hand and watching me go in and out of consciousness. Every time I lost consciousness, she thought, “That’s it. He’s not coming back.”

And I kept coming back.

The ambulance ride took an hour. I hung on for an hour.

We reached the hospital, and I went off a cliff. I went into end-stage hemorrhagic shock. My blood pressure was 60 over 40. I was convulsing with hypothermia.

They rushed me into a trauma bay. The doctors knew immediately what was wrong.

One of them came at me with this big needle and said, “I’d like permission to put this through your neck and into your jugular so we can transfuse you.”

Ultimately, I would need 10 units of blood to save my life.

Other people’s blood saved my life.

What he was proposing didn’t sound very pleasant, so I said, “Why?”

“In case there’s an emergency.”

He said, “This is the emergency, Mr. Junger.”

And, uh, he started preparing my neck.

Now, I have to tell you that at this point I’m an atheist. And I’m not an atheist who is a little mystical or a little spiritual. I’m nothing, right?

My father, who had been dead for eight years at that point, was also an atheist. He was an atheist and a physicist. That’s like atheist squared.

You’re going to need to know that for what I’m about to say.

I’m lying in the trauma bay. They’re preparing my neck, and suddenly this black pit opens beneath me. This howling void. This infinite abyss.

I’m being pulled into it.

I don’t know why. I don’t know that I’m dying. But like a wounded animal, I know that if you go into the black pit, you’re not coming out.

That I knew.

Then, suddenly, above me and slightly to my left, I see my father. There he is, in his essence, sort of in energy form.

And he communicates to me, “It’s okay. You don’t have to fight it. You can come with me. I’ll take care of you. I know how to do this. It’s all right.”

Go with you? You’re dead.

I’m just in for belly pain. You’ve got the wrong idea. I’m staying here.

I said to the doctor, because I was still conscious and still conversing, “You’ve got to hurry. I’m going right now. You’re losing me.”

They transfused me, stabilized me, and got me into the interventional radiology suite, which is a kind of magic.

In the old days, to save my life, they would have opened my abdomen, pushed my organs aside, and started looking for the ruptured artery before I bled out.

The outcomes are so poor that if they had needed to do that, they would have brought my wife in to say goodbye before I went into surgery.

But now there is interventional radiology.

They push a catheter through an incision in your groin and into your femoral artery. Once they are inside your vascular system, they can move these flexible catheters almost anywhere.

It’s like the interstate system. Where do you want to go in America? Now they’re inside your body. Where do you want to go?

They were trying to reach the rupture and embolize it, to plug it, stop the blood loss, and save my life.

But I have a very unusual vascular structure. I have a ligament in the wrong place, and that is what caused all these problems. They couldn’t get there.

I wasn’t sedated because they didn’t dare. My vital signs were too low.

This went on for hours. I was in incredible pain.

I remember that around one in the morning, one of the doctors said, “Well, we tried. There’s nothing we can do.”

And the other one said, “Yep.”

I didn’t know what that meant at the time, but it was the moment I realized I wasn’t going to make it. I was going to die.

It finally got through to me.

Instead of sending me in for an emergency laparotomy and probably killing me while trying to save me, they went through my left wrist.

It worked.

They saved my life.

And now I’m in this vast darkness. This wild darkness that goes on and on. I’m in this darkness for a century.

Then, finally, I hear a voice.

I hear the voice of a woman with an incredibly harsh Boston accent, and I think, “That might not be a good sign. Like, where am I exactly?”

I’m in the ICU at the hospital in Hyannis, Massachusetts. The voice belongs to an ICU nurse.

She tells me that I almost died the night before and that it is a miracle I’m alive.

Then she walks out of the room.

When she comes back an hour later, I’m thinking, “Oh my God. My father. I saw my father. The pit. What happened? Where am I? Where did I go last night?”

She says, “How are you doing?”

I say, “Not that well. What you said was terrifying.”

She says, “Try this. Instead of thinking about it as something scary, try thinking about it as something sacred.”

For me, as an atheist, something sacred is any information or process that protects human dignity.

I had spent my whole life going to front lines and returning with information that might help save human lives.

I went to the ultimate front line: my own mortality.

I was allowed to look over the edge.

What did I see? Did I come back with sacred information that could help other people live with more love, more courage, and less fear? Could it help them face death with bravery and peace?

I came home, and it was a lot like coming home from war.

We drove up the long dirt driveway. Pictures my daughters had made were taped to the trees.

I had been in this incomprehensible place, and now I was back in this familiar place. It was the best thing ever.

So why was I sobbing?

I didn’t understand it. I thought the hard part was over, but it wasn’t. It was just beginning.

I had experienced a classic NDE, a near-death experience. I had seen my dead father. There are thousands of cases like this.

Um, I researched it, and I started to develop this paranoid idea that I actually had died. That I had not made it. That everything after that moment in the ER was a dying hallucination.

I was the only one who didn’t know I was dead.

Psychologists call this derealization. It is a classic effect of trauma. It is very common among people who have almost died.

At one point, I ran up to my wife and grabbed her by the arms. I had really slipped into a kind of madness.

I said, “Just tell me I’m really here. That I survived. That you see me.”

She said, “Of course, sweetheart. You’re really here.”

And in my mind I thought, “That’s just the kind of thing a hallucination would say. Like, I’m onto you.”

Finally, in frustration, she asked, “Do you feel lucky or unlucky that this happened?”

I didn’t know how to answer.

I felt like there was this dark raven perched on my shoulder, calling into my ear, “You’re going to die. You’re going to die.”

But I also felt a little special. I had been allowed to look over the edge and come back.

Eventually, I reframed the question in more mythic terms: Was I blessed or cursed?

And, you know, there is no problem I can’t sort of nerd my way out of.

I thought, “Okay, maybe I’ll look up the origin of the word ‘blessing.’ Maybe that will help illuminate this conundrum.”

And indeed it did.

It comes from the Anglo-Saxon word for blood, blēdsian. The idea is that there is no blessing without a wounding, without a shedding of blood.

They are twins.

Everything is a blessing and a curse. Life is. Death is. You get them together.

And when I thought about it that way, I finally realized, “Okay, I’m going to die. The raven is right. I’m going to die.”

So how do I want to live?

Yes, I might die today. So who do I want to be today, if this might be my last day?

The blessing and the curse.

I’m still an atheist.

Um, sometimes people ask whether this experience diminished my fear of death.

No.

It was terrifying. It was scarier than a MEND warrior with a submachine gun telling me he would be the one to kill me. It was scarier than that.

But what did help was the wisdom of children.

They see things clearly. They see the world as it is.

That vision, that pure vision, is sacred because it is true. It protects human dignity. It helps us understand our lives.

At one point, I explained to my daughter how the solar system works. The Earth is a sphere here, the sun is over there, and the Earth moves around it.

She thought about that for a while. She’s a smart little bean.

A couple of days later, she said, “Daddy, I know why there’s night.”

I said, “Really, sweetheart? Why is there night?”

She said, “So that other people can have day.”

And then, finally, I got it.

I know why we die.

So that other people can live.

The world, the universe, cannot accommodate all of us forever. And if it could, it probably wouldn’t be a great idea.

So when we die, it is not something done to us. It is not something taken from us.

It is the final act of courage and love that we can perform for our children and their generation, so they can enjoy this beautiful world as we did.

Thank you so much.