Sebastian Junger Is Reporting Live From the Brink of Death

Over the course of his reporting career, Sebastian Junger has had several close calls with death. A bullet whizzed past his face in Afghanistan; another time, a bomb exploded in his Humvee. Even when he wasn’t covering war, death was a theme in his work. Junger’s most famous book, “The Perfect Storm,” is about extreme weather, but it’s also about a group of men who never came home.

In the introduction to his memoir, “In My Time of Dying,” which Simon & Schuster will publish on May 21, he describes his own near-drowning while surfing — the shock of being shoved underwater as if by an invisible hand, the flashbulb memory of dirty dishes in his sink, the way the shadow of death suddenly eclipsed an ordinary day.

“I was young,” Junger writes, “and had no idea the world killed people so casually.”

On June 16, 2020, Junger found himself face-to-face with mortality in a way he’d never been. One minute he was enjoying quiet time with his wife at a remote cabin on Cape Cod in Massachusetts; the next, he was in excruciating pain from a ruptured aneurysm. Hours later, as a doctor inserted a large-gauge transfusion line into his jugular vein, Junger sensed his father’s presence in the room.

His father had been dead for eight years — and he’d been a scientist and a rationalist — but there he was, trying to comfort his son. It didn’t work.

Junger writes, “I became aware of a dark pit below me and to my left.” It was “the purest black and so infinitely deep that it had no real depth at all.” He was horrified, knowing that “if I went into that hole I was never coming back.”

Junger survived. Later, he had questions — lots of them. His memoir braids a journalist’s best efforts at answers with a sexagenarian’s complicated acceptance of the inevitable.