In My Time of Dying

Everyone has a relationship with death whether they want one or not; refusing to think about death is its own kind of relationship.

A few days ago I was scratching around for a book to read. I was drawn to In My Time of Dying on the shelf, but settled on another, which turned out to be a dud, and something else which I also put down. I asked Kyle to choose for me and he chose In My Time of Dying. It’s not a long book. It’s a short wander and a small wonder. Its brevity adds to its humanity and its humility, and I read it quicker than I’ve read anything these last few months.

In the opening pages, Junger writes about his first near death experience, the kind where you know in the moment — rather than realising only afterwards — that you are probably about to die, and I’m grateful to him for it. I never know quite how to relate my own near death experiences, but I feel relieved of that now. I can’t. Junger writes it well and still it doesn’t connect, only scratches at what that sharp awakening is like, so I’ll likely never write it well enough to reflect what goes through the mind in those moments, nor relate fully the strangeness of feeling it both ripple out across, and be fully subsumed by, all past and future experience. And that’s okay.

Near death opens us up to life, insulation from it is insulation from life, and leads to unhealthy preoccupation with it.

I lay on the frozen sand imagining myself dead: arms askew, mouth full of sand, eyes blank. […] The phone would ring at my parents’ house and my mother would answer. At first, she wouldn’t understand. Then she’d scream. Eventually she would call my father […] The news would ripple out through the small group of people who loved me and the larger group of people who just knew me.

Later, when Junger describes the guilt of writing about dead men, having posthumously gotten to know their lives so intimately as to feel intrusive, I realise this and the last book I read (Magritte: This is not a biography) both cover this theme, intruding on the privacy of the dead.

Ken, Kyle’s father, and one archetype of a patriarch, is a writer of letters, or rather in any other era he would be a writer of letters, but in this one he is a writer of emails. His emails are earnest accounts of his experience — ranging from the mundane to the profound, that are kind, open, and almost always funny — they serve to knit together a shared story more fully.

This book too feels like a letter from a kind of patriarch, written with a humility that is unique to the necessarily occasional interrogation of being that that role allows. The kind of discovery that surprises and delights you, changes the way you see that person, increases your affection for them, but without in any way disturbing things as they are.

If storytelling is an expression of the essential anxiety of mortality, of entropy, then Ken’s letters affirm Ken’s existence, and Junger’s “letter”, though written with a finger in the pie of popular science, exists as an affirmation of his existence and of how he would like to be remembered, and is made most interesting in that light.