For what it’s worth, the week before my mother died, I was talking with a Catalan friend about afterlife. There’s no such thing, she insisted, and I posited that her kind of rationalist atheism was largely invented by white people for white people and would make little sense to most of the poor world. We both have a stake in Mexico: especially there, I argued, where almost everyone believes in some kind of “other side”. Well, not our mutual Mexican friend Lydia, retorted the Catalan; she’s a sensible woman, she’d be with me on this.
The morning after my mother died, I received a text out of the blue from Lydia: “Hola Ed, ¿cómo estás? How is your mum?” I called her immediately: “What do you know, Lydia?” “How is your mum?” she repeated, then: “Oh my God!” after I updated her, and: “But I had a dream about your mum last night. She came into my bedroom, sat on my bed and said: ‘Please look after Ed.’”
It is one thing for my dead mother to visit a close friend while in transit to the “next garden”, as I put it, but yet another to momentarily cross over to the other side yourself and meet your father. Which is what happened to Sebastian Junger.
Many people who admire Junger’s fine and famous writing may think that this articulate testimony to, and meditation upon, afterlife signifies him having lost his marbles. Or maybe he hallucinated and came up with a piece of beautifully written mumbo-jumbo, mindful that Roy Moody’s 1975 book Life After Life sold more than 14m copies.
Well, let them. This is a moving, compact, philosophically ambitious, theological and scientific meditation of raw honesty and a necessary endeavour at a time when atheist materialism verges on hegemony among intellectuals in western society.
Like all we combat reporters, Junger faced death many times in war, but also in peace: the book opens with a close shave surfing a winter sea – harbinger of nature’s indifferent, whimsical power. But it is a “vascular catastrophe”, one afternoon with his wife, that brings Junger to an operating theatre in Hyannis, Massachusetts, surrounded by doctors performing miracles of medicine. There, in a cigarette paper’s width between life and death: “I became aware of a dark pit below me and to my left… I was feeling myself getting pulled more and more sternly into the darkness. And just when it seemed unavoidable, I was aware of something else: My father.” Having died eight years previously, father summons son into the next world: “It’s OK, there’s nothing to be scared of… Don’t fight it. I’ll take care of you.”
Junger is successful, widely and rightly admired, adored at home in New York, with a country house in New England – and few apparent reasons to be carried by the currents on a “river of fear” of the metaphysical unknown. But he is. The experience humbles him into writing a humbling volume. A meditation on chance, death, physics, notions of God and the universe; the “natural order” – or disorder – of things, apathetic to our survival: “we have no idea whether the universe even notices us, much less cares”, and later: “a vast universe that doesn’t seem to care whether we die or not… the world goes on. The universe does not notice.”
Junger’s father came from a circle of famous physicists, a man who “didn’t believe in anything that he couldn’t measure and test”. Accordingly, although there’s a nod to the centrality of resurrection to Christianity, Junger’s meditations entwine spirituality with the very physics – which become metaphysics – with which his forebears dismissed the spirit or soul. The first and last sections of the book are a wonderful excursion through the work and world of his family, Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr et al, on the “vastness” whence we came and to which we return.
But on the way, Junger takes us on a journey of inquiry without answers; by definition, this is his one story the factcheckers cannot corroborate. He investigates the vascular system, its failure, then the saving of his life – while his sister-in-law dies of an aortic aneurysm days later. Which moves him to consider the randomness of everything and elemental questions such as: “Would we believe in God if we didn’t die?”
Relating his state of existence as a survivor of his own near death, Junger writes with Zen-like wisdom: “Every object is a miracle compared to nothingness and every moment an infinity when correctly understood to be all we’ll ever get.” But it is all? “Given that existence itself is almost infinitely unlikely, what if there were some post-death existence? What if the dead were not entirely gone… What if the great mysteries of the world… actually had a rational explanation?”
By sharing his story and reflections so honestly, Junger becomes a literary Charon, on this side of the River Styx, but with a view of the far bank. Closing the book after a second reading, you stare out at whatever is beyond the window – a grey, bland cityscape – to realise its weird value, and that we are all subject to the whim of chance and nature, our lives determined (and oddly enrichened) by death, “on its terms”, writes Junger, rather than ours. Except that death is not a final curtain: when we die, we cross the Styx into another place, about which we know nothing for sure until we get there.
Indeed, this is Junger’s startling conclusion, apart from a final-page, fundamental affirmation of love: “that it is cosmically prohibited to understand all things because consciousness cannot survive a complete understanding of itself... the ultimate truth must never be known”.
• In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face With the Idea of an Afterlife by Sebastian Junger is published by 4th Estate (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
