Name: What it feels like to die | The Gray Area
Uploaded: 2025-06-17T17:08:29.000Z
Duration: 50 min 30 s
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For the show this week, I talked to Sebastian Younger, the writer, filmmaker, and author of the book In My Time of Dying.

We talk about his own near-death experience and how it shook up his worldview and really changed how he thought about everything.

This week's episode is audio only, but we'll be back on video next week.

I've always been a cold, hard materialist on this one.

Our brain shuts down, consciousness fades away, and the lights go out.

And beyond that, what else is there to say?

I had no experience of life before I was born, and I expect to have no experience of life after I die.

As best I can tell, that's the most reasonable assumption we can make about death.

But most reasonable does not mean definitely true.

There's the conventional view, taken by major religions, that the shape of your afterlife depends on the quality of your actual life.

I have my issues with that, but it's a widely held belief.

The point, in any case, is that this is one of the oldest questions we have, which means there are all sorts of theories about how consciousness, in some form, might survive the death of the body.

However unlikely these possibilities might be, they're not impossible.

And if they're not impossible, how seriously should we take them?

I'm Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area.

He's a former war reporter, a documentarian, and the author of several books, including his most recent one called In My Time of Dying.

Junger's not the religious or superstitious type.

He's a self-described atheist and a science-minded rationalist.

And I suspect he would have given a very confident response to that question about life after death, until the day he almost died, an experience that didn't necessarily transform his worldview.

I wouldn't say my answer to the what happens when we die question is all that different after reading the book, but I would say that I'm less certain about it.

Before we get to the strangeness of your near-death experience, can you just describe what happened to you the day you almost died?

My health is very good, and so it never occurred to me that I would have a sudden medical issue that would send me to the ER or drop me in my boots, as it were.

So I just had no thoughts like that about myself.

And so one afternoon, it was during COVID, my family and I were living in a house in the woods in Massachusetts that has no cell phone coverage.

On the property is a cabin, no electricity or anything like that.

And we went out there to spend a couple of hours, and literally in mid-sentence, I felt this sort of bolt of pain in my abdomen, and I couldn't make it go away.

I thought it was indigestion, and I stood up and almost fell over.

And so I sat back down, and I said to my wife, I'm going to need help.

What was happening, I later found out, was that I had an undiagnosed aneurysm in my pancreatic artery, and one of several arteries that go through to the pancreas.

And one of them had a bulge in it from a weak spot.

I mean, they're really, really deadly, particularly in the abdomen, because it's hard for the doctors to find them.

And if you're stabbed in the stomach and an artery is severed, the doctors sort of know where to put their finger, as it were, to plug the leak.

But if it's just internal hemorrhage, your abdomen's basically a big bowl of  It's very, very hard to find it.

And so I was losing probably a pint of blood every 10 or 15 minutes.

And you know, there's like 10 pints in the human body, 10 or 12 pints.

And I was a one-hour drive from the nearest hospital.

So by the time they got me there, I'd probably lost two-thirds of my blood.

My blood pressure was 60 over 40, and I was in end-stage hemorrhagic shock.

I was probably 10 minutes from dead, but I was still conscious.

Blessedly, I had no idea that I was dying.

I was enormously confused by what was happening, and I had no clue about the seriousness of it. 60 over 40.

My God, how were you even still alive at that point?

That's sort of where you cross over into a place where you can't recover from, even if you get a massive blood transfusion, which I got.

I mean, if you need that much blood, receiving that much blood causes other problems that can also kill you.

So you can die in the hospital from blood loss with plenty of blood in your veins because other things happen chemically in your bloodstream that will kill you.

And I was sort of right on the cusp of when that could reasonably have started to happen.

And I'd actually had sort of intermittent pain in my abdomen for about six months, which, just being an idiot dude, I just ignored, right?

And, you know, it was bad enough to make me sit down at times.

And then it would go away, and I'd forget about it.

And that was probably the aneurysm getting to a kind of critical point where it was starting to leak a little bit, starting to bleed a little bit or something.

You know, if I'd gone to the doctor, I could have avoided a lot of drama, but I didn't.  Note to everyone in the audience, if you know something's wrong with your body, don't fuck around.

I mean, pain's an indicator, and persistent pain's an indicator.

And frankly, your unconscious mind, listen, you know, I'm an atheist.

But the unconscious mind actually has access to a lot of information about the body.

It communicates with your conscious mind in these strange signals and intuitions and feelings.

And one of the stranger things about this was the first time I felt this pain in my abdomen, I had this bizarre thought.

I thought, huh, that's the kind of pain where you later find out, oh, my God, I have terminal cancer.

Like, I immediately thought this was a mortal threat, and then immediately dismissed it as, you know, listen, you just have a pain in your abdomen.

And what was the survival rate for your condition that day?

The survival rate is as low as 30%, but I assume that that's for a reasonable transport time to the hospital.

It took me 90 minutes to get to a doctor.

The brain does such strange things in these moments.

You knew on some level that something was really wrong here.

But even at the hospital, you write about not having any grand thoughts about life or mortality or even about your family.

You wrote, I had all the introspection of a gut shot coyote, which is a great line, but what the hell is that about?

You think it's just a kind of defense mechanism in the brain, or is it just plain old fashioned shock?

I was in hemorrhagic shock and deep into hypothermia, which comes with hemorrhagic shock.

So, blood in your abdomen, outside of your vascular system, is extremely irritating to the organs.