Why Do the Dying See the Dead?

What happens when a committed atheist experiences a traumatic medical episode, almost dies, and, while almost dying, sees his dead father hovering above him?

This is the experience of the renowned journalist and author, Sebastian Junger, as recounted in his brief memoir In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face-to-Face with the Idea of an Afterlife. Junger is a top-notch storyteller and an insightful writer. It is no surprise that Junger, who also wrote The Perfect Storm and spent years as a war correspondent, has written this book as a riveting medical adventure, but it is also rife with well-considered metaphysical reflections. It adds up to serve as a fascinating case study about how people with differing views on faith and religion can interpret the same real-life events. One’s reaction to the story may serve as a crude Rorschach test, a magazine quiz on what you believe.

Religious belief isn’t necessarily like personal politics, but they share certain features, for better or worse. The most notable is that one’s religious persuasion – or lack thereof – often forms a key part of one’s personal identity. You don’t necessarily have to wear your belief or atheism or agnosticism as a badge of honor, but internally your mind does tend to settle into a fixed point. As you live your life, your experiences rub up against that fixed point, and that point is apt to change, whether in one direction or the other.

I like to think of it as if each of us is on a train. On one end of the track is strict materialism. This is the approach to reality that everything in the world is the result of some combination of physics and chemistry, and that our bodies as well as our minds are advanced biological entities, forged like all life forms over the course of eons through evolution as determined by the randomness of natural selection.

On the other end of the track is the belief that there exists a God, which God created the universe and actually cares about what we human beings are doing. This understanding of reality serves as a foundation for most of the world’s great religious traditions, which many involve one God or multiple gods, but which are unified in their belief that there is something outside of the earthly plane, often called spirit, or the divine, and that we people, collectively, and persons, individually, have some relationship to the divine that is both unique and imbued with meaning.

Here’s the point. The track between one end and the other end is long, and there are lots of stops.

Sebastian Junger’s story is as follows: The morning prior to his almost-deadly medical episode, Junger had a dream in which he was floating above his wife and two young daughters, who were crying. He called out to them, but they couldn’t hear him. He came to realize that he had died. He woke up, “engulfed in anger and shame,” and described it as unlike any dream he ever had.

The next day, he felt compelled to cut down dense brush that was encroaching on his long driveway, a project he had been putting off for months. The family lived in a rural area on the far end of Cape Cod, at least an hour from the nearest hospital. That afternoon, he convinced his wife to put off work and they went on a walk into the woods. During the walk, Junger felt a sharp pain in his abdomen and he knew that something was terribly wrong.

What follows is the adventure. Junger can barely walk. His wife has to carry him back to the house. The babysitter is able to get one bar of cell service and calls the ambulance, which soon rumbles up the newly cleared driveway. He is kept alive in the ambulance, barely, gets to the emergency room and is whisked away to the surgeons and radiologists. After replacing pints and pints of lost blood, they soon discover that he has a ruptured aneurysm in his pancreatic artery and, if they don’t repair it, he will surely die.

Too weak to be sedated, Junger is awake while the doctors and nurses pump him with blood and try to figure out how to repair the rupture. At the moment when it seems as if all hope is lost, Junger notices on his left side a deep, black nothingness. It frightens him. When he looks up, he sees his father hovering above his bed, telling him wordlessly that it’s okay to go with him, which Junger understood to mean going into the blackness. His father has been dead for eight years.

As evidenced by him writing the book, Junger does not die. After several attempts, the doctors are able to reach the ruptured artery and repair the bleed. Within days he is reunited with his wife and children. While the heroic medical story is worthwhile, it is Junger’s reflections on what happened to him that are more telling.

The modern mind, which is a by-product of the post-Enlightenment Western Civilization in which it operates, does not offer a particularly fertile ground to explore questions of religious belief, spiritual experience, or the transcendental. When encountered with any situation in need of explanation, we are culturally trained to start with a material, scientific explanation, one grounded in or extrapolated from natural laws, and then. . . well, that’s pretty much it. If it can’t be measured, if it’s not susceptible to a double-blind study, even if our existing understanding of the world cannot accommodate it, it is thrown into the pile of other anecdotal, sample-size-too-small phenomena, and not taken on by serious people.

This disciplined approach to understanding the natural world has led to immeasurable scientific and technological progress, which advances have benefited us humans in incredible ways. But this world view does have a blind spot. Just because something is unprovable, doesn’t mean it’s not true.

Junger describes himself as an atheist. His father, with whom he had a close life-long relationship, was a physicist and staunch materialist, and Junger followed in those intellectual footsteps. Of all the thoughts running through Junger’s mind on that hospital bed, “What’s HE doing here?” can be read as the only appropriate reaction to what seemed like a cosmic joke. After the episode, Junger, flexing his journalistic bona fides, dives into the available research on NDEs, “Near Death Experiences” —apparently there are decades of serious medical research on this — and was shocked to find out that most people who survive NDEs describe experiences quite similar to Junger’s. These things not only happen, but they happen more often than you might think, and, because of advances in medicine, happen more and more each day. Who knew?

There are several strains of the available research that are particularly poignant to Junger. The first is that many people who are dying describe seeing their deceased loved-ones, a parent, a child, a friend, always welcoming, soothing, telling them some version of “it’s going to be okay.” The other harkens back to Junger’s dream the day before, as there are others who describe the experience of floating above their own body, even visiting other rooms in the home or hospital with complete sensory clarity.

Junger analyzes the evidence as any self-respecting investigator should, remaining skeptical and not jumping to any conclusions, lest they be premature. He notes that there are many who default to the conclusion that these experiences are merely hallucinations originating somewhere in the brain chemistry – simply because they must be – but there is little positive evidence that helps prove this assumption. Junger himself is not satisfied with this explanation, partly because there is no compelling evolutionary reason to see loved ones beckoning you to your death, but more so because the brain chemistry explanation doesn’t account for two recurring situations:

• Some people have encountered dead people whom that person didn’t even know was dead yet (!), and

• Some people have been able to describe events taking place in other rooms while their body was in a different room.

But perhaps the biggest reason he doesn’t buy into that explanation is — and now I’m putting words into his mouth, but not much — he knows that whatever he experienced was something else entirely. This should, and must, include the dream that served as a premonition of his near death. That Junger had no cultural or personal framework predisposing him to such an experience is bound to take much of the wind out of the skeptic’s sails.

In fact, Junger describes how, upon seeing his dead father, he felt revulsion at the suggestion that he follow him across to the other side. There was seemingly no feeling of warmth to accompany the encounter, and the black pit did not seem a welcoming option. Yet, even after his life was miraculously saved, Junger experienced symptoms of PTSD, descended into depression, and even started to question his own sanity, including whether he was actually alive or dead. He eventually started to analyze what happened to him with the benefit of the passage of time, yet, to my mind, despite the strong start, the analysis eventually fizzled out. The predominantly materialist worldview, including the absence of a mature religious perspective, left Junger ill-equipped to effectively process what had happened to him.

It is here that Junger starts to introduce a lot of ideas and possibilities into the discussion, some interesting, some, in my opinion, misplaced. These are the intellectual machinations of a thoughtful person who experienced something that he admits was probably supernatural yet cannot square that experience with his materialist world view. Inertia is a powerful force, but one could hear the train starting to rumble away from the station.

His first foray into an explanation falls headlong into the materialist trap. He becomes particularly focused on quantum theory, notably about how there are profound mysteries embedded into the quantum universe — like subatomic particles inexorably linked across great distances — that seem to mirror in some sense the mysteries arising out of near-death experiences and the idea of an extra-material plane of existence. Junger’s fascination with quantum theory, strangely enough, has its roots in the fact that his aunt (as a teenager!) was involved in a sexual relationship with the physicist Erwin Schrodinger (then in his 40’s), he of the cat-that-is-both-alive-and-dead-at-the-same-time metaphor. The lesson there, it appears, is that the quantum world does not seem to line up with the world that we inhabit, as the quantum world exists on a plane that defies our everyday understanding of reality and requires a conscious observer to form physical reality itself.

Junger does not ultimately tie any of this together – probably, frankly, because it cannot be done, by him or anyone else. This exercise reminds me of those unwavering atheists who, faced with the statistical near-impossibility of the universe existing, of the universe not collapsing, and of life emerging, would rather postulate that there must therefore be an infinite number of universes rather than entertain for a split second the far simpler explanation.

Junger’s musings on quantum theory coincide with his later discussion of the mystery of consciousness, including what separates each of our consciousnesses from one another’s. This discussion is more interesting. Was that person actually his father? If so, why are father and son now interacting on a transcendent plane? Many of the dying feel a sense of oneness to everything in the universe. Is this real? If so, is death merely the end of an illusion of separateness? These types of questions take us back to the work of the 19th-Century German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, who based much of his philosophical system on the notion that all life is connected on a metaphysical level:

Where the [moral person] discerns in all other persons, nay, in every living thing, his own entity, and feels therefore that his being is commingled, is identical with the being of whatever is alive. By death he loses only a small part of himself. Putting off the narrow limitations of the individual, he passes into the larger life of all mankind, in whom he always recognized, loved, his very self; and the illusion of Time and Space, which separated his consciousness from that of others, vanishes.

On the Basis of Morality (1839).

Of course, this doesn’t necessarily get you all the way to believing in a creator God, let alone one that cares a lick about any of us, but the recognition of a transcendent plane of reality propels you pretty far along the track in that direction, even if there might be some lingering reticence to get off at the last stop. There seems to me a world of difference between diving into the nothing and diving into the everything. Everything, in fact.

I have a friend who would readily acknowledge that spiritual encounters, particularly involving deceased loved ones, are decidedly real, but is nonetheless unwilling to believe that any creator God exists. His disdain for what he considers to be the irredeemably corrupt institution of the Catholic Church, the religion of his youth, has soured him on organized religion in all its forms. For him, the God of religion is the “magical man in the sky telling me what to do”, a form of social control, an entity to reject, not something for any reasonable person to believe. As I said, the track is long, and the train moves in both directions.

There is a memorable scene in the underrated and creepy movie, The Mothman Prophecies, supposedly based on true events, in which a Washington Post reporter, John Klein (played by Richard Gere) tries to help make sense of a series of strange happenings. Klein is being tormented by demon-like entities who seem to know everything and can even foretell the future. He seeks the insight of a scholar, and asks him, are these things God?

The professor considers the question and points to a nearby skyscraper.

If there was a car crash ten blocks away, that window washer would see it. But that doesn’t mean he’s God. Or that he’s even smarter than we are. But from where he’s seeing, he can see a little further down the road.

To borrow from the adjacent genre of horror movies, if you are demon and your purpose is to weaken the faith of your victim, the last thing you want to do is reveal yourself to be a demon.

I have another friend who fancies himself quite the materialist. But I know for a fact he would never walk down the creaky stairs into the dark basement in the middle of the night. Why not? Is he scared of a murderer? A serial killer, perhaps? That highly developed mammal evolved through natural selection with opposable thumbs, manual dexterity, and cognitive capacity, such that he was able to cultivate and wield a deadly tool such as a kitchen knife? Or is he actually scared of something else?

Once you break the veil of the material world and allow for the possibility that spiritual experiences are real (like interacting with your dead father, for example) it might not take you all the way there, but it does serve as some evidence in support of the claims of religion. It might seem obvious, but all of the major religions are founded on some kind of divine, other-worldly experiences. In fact, the most consequential religion of them all — in my biased opinion — is predicated on the story of a man who dies and then returns.

If there is indeed a world beyond our physical reality, it should come as no surprise that the boundary between life and death is where that drama would be played out, where it must be played out. It was always death. It is the thing so terrifying that we live most of our lives in a series of endless diversions, which, as Pascal said “passes our time and brings us imperceptibly to our death.” Death is the one thing that forces us all to account for our lives. To what? To Whom? That is the question. I do know, and I have a feeling Sebastian Junger also knows, that it is not photons and electrons.

Leo Tolstoy, that god-like creator of worlds, wrote a novella about the life and death of one common man, although it is the death that dominates most of the action. In The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), the hero lives a perfectly normal and respectable life by the standards of his time and place. When he is 45 years old, he becomes ill and never gets better. As the sickness worsens, his soul sours, and the story is told entirely from the dying man’s point of view. The pains and degradations of his illness isolate him from his wife and children and almost every other person, and he is consumed by self-pity, regret, and a sense of meaninglessness. As he nears the end, Death becomes a fixed idea, almost a person, who coolly accompanies Ivan Ilyich wherever he goes, eventually to the bed in which he will spend his final moments.

Tolstoy was a Christian, albeit one whose ideas on what that meant got him excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church. The Death of Ivan Ilyich contains virtually no mention of God, as Ivan Ilyich, and presumably most people of his ilk at that time, did not live anything resembling a religious or reflective life. His life, and theirs, was one of diversion. Much like ours.

Here is how it ends.

He understood that he was lost. There was no return. The end had come. The very end. […]

For three whole days, during which time had ceased to exist for him, he floundered in a black sack that an unseen, irresistible power was forcing him into. He struggled as a man condemned to death struggles in the hands of the executioner, knowing he cannot save himself. And with every minute, he felt that, despite all of his labor, he was coming closer and closer to the thing that terrified him. […]

[H]e tumbled into the hole and there, at the end of it, something glimmered. What had happened to him was like the sensation one sometimes experiences in a railway carriage when one thinks one is going backwards while one is really going forwards and suddenly becomes aware of the real direction.

At that point, Ivan Ilyich’s schoolboy son crept into room and came up to his bed. One of the dying man’s flailing arms fell on the boy’s head, who clutched his father’s hand to his lips and burst into tears. His wife joined him at his bedside. He felt sorry for them.

He glanced at his wife, indicating his son, and said “Take him out… sorry for him... for you.” He wanted to add “forgive me” (prosti), but said “let me pass” (propusti), and waved his hand, knowing that He whose understanding matters would understand. […]

He searched for his old habitual fear of death and didn’t find it. Where was death? What death? There was no fear, because there was no death.

Instead of death there was light.

“So that’s it!” he suddenly said aloud. “Such joy!”

[…]

“It is finished!” someone said above him.

He heard these words and repeated them in his soul. “Death is finished,” he said to himself. “It is no more.”

He drew in a breath, stopped in the midst of a sigh, stretched out, and died.

This is how the book ends. (Remember, I said “virtually” no mention of God. See if you can spot the exceptions.)

If you live in New York City, you know that subway trains often get delayed, usually for no good reason. You also know that they have a tendency to get delayed one stop away from your final destination. What does one do in these situations? That’s easy. You get out of the subway, climb up the stairs to the world above, and walk the rest of the way.

Because, despite all the diversions, the reality is that none of us know when it will be our time.

This post is part of a series I have referred to generally as “Godlessness is Not a Virtue.” Click here for Part I (an introduction to my own religious background and a minor diatribe against what I consider to be the weaker arguments against religious belief), Part II (about the “philosopher” and “historian” Yuval Harari and the absurdity of him providing moral guidance to anyone), Part III (about the miracle of the solar eclipse), and, well, let’s consider the above post Part IV. In between musings about movies, sports, and music, I sometimes pull a bait and switch. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Either way, thank you for indulging me.