Thinking About Death on a Bright Summer Day

You can hold tightly to life, but in the end you have no control at all

Painting by Christopher Robin—Used with Permission

I just finished reading In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife, by Sebastian Junger. In June 2020, Junger nearly died from a ruptured aneurysm in his pancreatic artery.

He bled out into his abdomen, coming so close to death that some inexplicable things happened — like a visit from his (deceased) father and a black vortex opening up beneath him. At one point he heard a doctor say he was the sickest person in the hospital.

I purchased the book because I saw Junger give an interview about his experience on The Daily Show and I am fascinated with tales of near-death experiences. This isn’t a simple case of morbid curiosity. Seven years ago, my 15-year-old daughter died. I’ve been wondering where she went ever since.

I think someone like Junger — someone who was so close to death that he had a conversation with his dead father while staring briefly into the abyss — might have some answers for me. He has seen, albeit briefly, what might happen to our souls after our hearts stop beating.

Junger, an award-winning journalist and self-proclaimed atheist, has a unique perspective about what may or may not be possible when it comes to souls surviving death.

He writes about the afterlife the way I’d expect an investigative reporter might, examining it from all angles. He is not dismissive of his own experience. He’s also not dismayed by the possibility that this vast mystery may remain unsolvable, at least to those of us who are still alive. But what I loved best about Junger’s take on the afterlife is the idea that it’s not insane to believe that our souls continue in some way, given how random and implausible it is that we exist at all.

“Randomly finding a specific grain of sand on the first try among all the grains on earth would be millions of millions of times more likely than the universe existing. And yet here we are,” writes Junger.

My admittedly selfish interpretation of this statement is that there’s no reason to believe death is the end. And if death isn’t the end, then maybe that means I’ll see my daughter again.

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“Finding yourself alive after almost dying is not, as it turns out, the kind of party one might expect,” Junger writes. “You realize that you weren’t returned to life, you were just introduced to death.”

I can relate to Junger, though I’ve never come close to dying. I have, however, been introduced to death. I sat beside my daughter as she died. I spoke to her. I learned about death. I stalked it, trying to understand what it would look like for Ana so that I could help her through it. I didn’t — I couldn’t — look away or use euphemisms or deny that it was coming. Ana needed me to be present and calm and cognizant of her reality.

In her last moments, I sat with her. I held her hand. I told her I loved her, that it was okay to go. She’d been unconscious for most of the day, unresponsive except to whisper occasionally to people or spirits we couldn’t see.

When I said my last words to her, giving her permission to leave, she opened her eyes. She looked at me, then beyond me. She died and I sat with her, having learned that she might be transitioning, and that she needed calm. She needed love. She still needed me to be her mother in that quiet room, with her cooling body, and death lingering in the shadows of her childhood bedroom.

That night, I wasn’t just introduced to death. I sat with death as I waited with Ana, wondering what her spirit was experiencing. You don’t fully emerge from a moment like that as the same person you were before. I didn’t have a near-death experience. But my ability to avoid death, to deny it, to remain oblivious to the absurdities of life and death and time — that evaporated in an instant.

I had become aware of what Junger described as “Death on its terms. The great gaping pit that has everything and nothing inside it, including your dead father.” Or, your dead daughter.

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Since the moment Ana died, I’ve been reading about death and thinking about death and walking along gorgeous forest paths wondering about death. Today, I took my morning walk on my favorite trail. It was a perfect bright June morning as I wandered along the path and wondered what my death might look like.

I am obsessed with death not because I want to die, but because I’m still trying to figure out where Ana could possibly have gone. I am confused by life in a way that I can’t explain, but you might recognize if, like Junger, you came precipitously close to the end of all things.

There’s a tension that exists in a death-aware life that is difficult to manage sometimes. I notice things more — shadows on tree trunks, the way my dog sighs when I lift him up, the Gerbera daisies wilting when they need water. I recognize moments that once would’ve gone by unmarked and feel an aching need to pause and reflect on them. But I’m also susceptible to the helpless pull of the world’s needs — to work and sleep and late-night TV — the meaningless ways I spend time as if it were endless. It’s confusing.

You might recognize this confusion if you’ve lost a child. You’d definitely recognize it if you’d hovered beside that child, counting her breaths, taking her temperature, ready with the meds and the ice packs and the hospital bag. This state of crisis can last for one month or twelve months or five years — imagine trying to keep your child alive for that long only to fail.

My friend and fellow bereaved mom, Taryn Jarboe often writes about how she lived with the constant threat of death for extended, blurry, exhausting stretches of time — an experience common for parents of children with terminal cancer. Taryn’s daughter, June, died from neuroblastoma when she was 18 months old.

In her recent essay about the lasting trauma of this experience, Taryn wrote “I didn’t just consume the day’s tasks; I also poured every ounce of loving energy I had into June, who I feared might die. As if my willpower was enough to keep her alive.”

As a parent, you don’t simply move on from an experience like this. You emerge, blinking into a dimly lit landscape of grief, and try to figure out what the hell happened to your baby and how the hell the world is supposed to make sense anymore.

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I’m always imagining the place where Ana and June might be, but it’s so hard to believe in a place you can’t see. How can our consciousness, the essence of who we are, exist outside of our bodies and the dull grey matter of our brains? Where do we go?

I want to believe these stories of near-death experiences because they’re my only glimpse into what Ana may have experienced as she died. Many of them suggest there is peace and beauty and a different kind of reality — a forgiveness of the troubles of corporeal existence, a rejoining of some nebulous whole.

That’s a beautiful thought, but I don’t care about rejoining the collective energy of the universe. Quantum physics holds no fascination for me. I just want to see Ana again.

If I think about death enough, maybe I’ll solve the puzzle. Maybe I’ll open up a crack that lets me sense Ana and feel her and find her while I’m still alive. I don’t have a death wish, but I do think we cling too closely and too long to life. That makes us wholly unprepared for the inevitable moment that the curtain comes down.

//

I watched my kid die, but that’s not the scariest thing in the world. Death is scarier and Ana did it first. She did it before me. She did it alone, as we all must. I want to tell her I’m sorry. I want to tell her how brave she was. I want to know if she’s heard any of the things I’ve said or read any of the words I’ve written.

I think the main message that Junger is trying to communicate by writing his story of dying is that we’re too distracted by life. We’re too dismissive of death. It’s coming for us and we’re not ready, we’re not appreciative, we’re missing the point. The experience of being completely consumed by the unlikeliness of his life, that it still exists, that it ever existed, comes up again and again in his book. He writes:

“There was virtually no activity that couldn’t come grinding to a halt because I realized all over again how unlikely the whole thing was. Why wasn’t everyone crying all the time over this? I thought. Have you seen the trees—really seen them? Or the clouds? Or the way water droplets form digital patterns on the porch screen after it rains?”

When you’ve been introduced to death, it’s impossible not to think about time and how short it is and how the world likes to fill it up.

The Western world, with its capitalism and social media and Marvel movies, makes it easy to believe we have all the time in the world. The calendar and the holidays and the endless checklists and to-dos imply our lives remain limitless as long as we just keep slicing it up into smaller and smaller chunks.

I thought that was the case. I thought death was for other people until Ana died. I didn’t believe in death before that. I didn’t worry about wasting time.

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I think about death because I had to for Ana. A part of me will always remain at Ana’s side, in her quiet room, beside her quiet body, wishing I could go with her as she transitioned to the place I’m finding so hard to imagine is real. That was the day I truly saw death and it changed me forever.

How do you recover from something like that? I’ve pondered this question with Taryn and other bereaved parents. We bargained and begged, hoped and raged, and watched helplessly as our children got sicker. You can hold tightly to life, but in the end you have no control at all.

“In a sense, modern society has the worst of both: lives that can end in a moment because that has always been true, but the illusion of guaranteed continuity,” writes Junger.

It’s this illusion that was stripped away from Junger when he came precipitously close to dying. It’s this illusion that evaporated for me when Ana took her last breath. I began a new journey then, carrying a grief that settled into my bones, a grief that lives there forever. It’s loss and love and hope that make me think about death — my death, Ana’s death, everyone’s death.

I imagine that when my time comes, my body will sigh, fluids and gasses escaping, heat releasing, and all the pain that torments my trapped soul will be free. In that moment, a tremendous cloud of grief will rise and shimmer, a spectrum of blinding light visible only to other dead souls.

I think about death because when I die, the torment that has tethered me to the child I lost will fade back into the quantum universe as my consciousness finally, at last, after all this time, crosses the threshold where Ana waits. And why not? Anything’s possible when you walk with death on a bright summer day.