In My Time of Dying by Sebastian Junger

 

In My Time of Dying is the fifth book I have read by Sebastian Junger since I met him almost a year ago. He was the opening keynote speaker at the Hannah Arendt Center Conference in October 2024. 

In all of Junger's books and films, death hovers in the background when it is not the main topic. As the title says, this book is about Junger's near/almost death from abdominal bleeding. The cause is complex and rare.  He was close enough to death to have the haunting experience of his (dead) father beckoning him into the world beyond this life.  

Reading the book, made me look at my own brushes with death differently. I thought before reading this book I had three near-death experiences. Now I think it was one. Two of them, a missile explosion and a 75-mph motorcycle crash, left me badly injured and temporarily unconscious, but I was still (painfully) aware.  The 50-mph bicycle crash in which I broke my neck, I have no recollection of and near total memory loss for months.

And each of my brushes with death was a sudden bone-breaking crash or explosion. I have never had brush with death that was from disease or internal organ failure.  

Life gone wrong in an instant brought me to death's door, not a slow aching internal failure as was the case with Junger. The book is precise and vivid on the small arteries and ligaments that conspired to nearly kill Junger. It also chronicles current research and experiences of those who are near death or actually dead for a short time and revived.  

Shortly after finishing the book, I had elevated heart rate in the night for five days.  Two of those days I woke up feeling my heart pounding in my chest.  After the second night, I went to the emergency room and then to a cardiologist.  It was probably a virus--I had very high rest heart rates when I had covid. I might not have gone to the emergency room, but after reading how Junger put off finding the cause of his abdominal discomfort, I decided to get checked by doctors.  Also in my mind was a friend whose rest heart rate raced to more than 150 beats per minute for no apparent reason.  

I strongly recommend In My Time of Dying as a story very well told and a cautionary tale if you have any tendency to ignore medical problems.

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Junger's other books, as I noted above, have the life/death theme:

War about a year with several months at the most dangerous forward outpost in Afghanistan. Junger also co-produced the documentary Restrepo about that year in Afghanistan.

Freedom about a long and occasionally danger walk along hundreds of miles of railroad tracks in Pennsylvania.

A Perfect Storm about a fatal shipwreck.

Tribe about, among other things, who we will give our life for.

The next book by Junger I will read is A Death in Belmont about murder in a small town near Boston when I was a child.  

 

Memoir from an Antproof Case

Tonight I finished a book I thought I had read more than 20 years ago, but I had not. I had read a couple of chapters and lost interest. But I have read all of Helprin's other novels and short stories, so I decided to give it another try.

I like it better now, but having finished it, I will not keep it. I won't read it again.  It is the memoir of a grumpy 80 year old. Worse, it is a grumpy 80 year old who loathes coffee. He attacks espresso machines on occasion and has ended friendships and marriages because of his anti-coffee obsession.

For a coffee lover like me, his rants are painful.  Worse I am in the midst of reading the 15th book in the Master and Commander series in which the central characters are two great friends who share a love of music and coffee.  And I just spent a week with a good friend from the Army in the 1970s who has been a Franciscan monk in Germany since shortly after leaving the military during the Cold War.  Bruder Timotheus and I have very different lives, but we share a love of good coffee.

I realized as I read the book, it is also something of a blueprint for my favorite novel by Helprin: Paris in the Present Tense. In both novels the central character is at the end of his life telling a story that begins with losing both of his parents in a brutal, senseless murder.  Both lead lives of love, loss, promise, courage and failed expectations.

But Paris left me wanting to re-read the book and mark passages, which I did. Antproof  left me smiling thinking that this was the trial run before the book I love most.

Since it is Helprin, there are brilliant passages:
The human soul is ordinary, existing by the billion, and on a crowded street you pass souls a thousand times a minute. And yet within the soul is a graceful, shining song more wonderful than the stunning cathedrals that stand over the countryside unique and alone. The simple songs are best. They last into time as inviolably as light.

And Helprin's books always have humor.  This book begins: Call me Oscar Progresso, or for that matter call me anything you want.... following that first line I was ready for a grumpy old narrator.

And the book is dedicated--To Juan Valdez.