I was supposed to die at about 8:00 PM on June 16th, 2020. I headed towards that moment, my whole life, without knowing it. And I’m here to talk, in part, about how complicated it is to dodge your fate.
I always thought death was very dramatic. Because I was a war reporter for almost 20 years, I was blown up in a Humvee by a roadside bomb. It went off under the engine block, instead of under us, so we survived. I was in firefights where bullets hit sandbags, sandbags so close to my head that a kick could have sent them into my face, just inches away. I was seized by a shadowy group called the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta. There were Ijaw warriors in the creeks of the Niger Delta. They thought I was a spy, and one guy came up to me with a machine gun, introduced himself by saying, ‘When we kill you later, I’ll be the one to do it.’ I just remember thinking, ‘Don’t let your knees buckle, stay standing.’ I did.
I got out of the business of war. I turned away from the drama, the meaningfulness, the violence, the excitement, and the horror. And I turned towards life. I stopped war reporting. I got married, had a family, had two little girls, quite late in life. I was in my 50s. And that was when I found out the truly terrifying thing about death, which is how casual it can be, almost an afterthought. How mundane. ‘Oh, you were scheduled to die today? Delete.’ It’s like that also.
So this was during COVID. My family and I moved from New York, where we live, to Massachusetts. We were in an old house deep in the woods, at the end of a dead-end dirt road, no cell phone service. The landlines were so old that when it rained, they shorted out and didn’t work. In other words, it was paradise. And one afternoon, we got a call from some teenage girls who lived up the road. We knew the family. They would babysit. Of course we said yes. They came over. My girls were 3 years old and 6 months old at the time. And we, my wife and I, Barbara, went out down this little path into the woods to a little cabin that I’d built overlooking this little lake, completely off the grid, the most beautiful place on the planet. And in this place of beauty and tranquility, and intimacy, and peace, is where I found out.
I felt an odd pain in my abdomen. I’m a healthy person. I’m not a walking heart attack. I didn’t think much about it. It wouldn’t go away. I stood up to try to work it out, and the floor went reeling away from me. I sat back down. I said, ‘I think I’m going to need help.’ I didn’t know what was happening. I had an undiagnosed aneurysm in my pancreatic artery, something that’s incredibly rare and incredibly deadly. An aneurysm is an unnatural ballooning of the artery wall. It will grow throughout your life, very gradually, throughout decades, very hard to detect, asymptomatic, and eventually, it will get to a critical point, and it will rupture, and then you start bleeding out into your own abdomen. I was losing a pint of blood every 10 or 15 minutes. There are 10 pints of blood in the human body. You can lose about half of that before you die. And we lived an hour from the hospital. I was literally a human hourglass.
I got one hand over my wife’s shoulder. She got an arm around my waist. She dragged me out of the woods, down the path, got me to the driveway, the dirt driveway, put me in the passenger seat of the car, ran in, grabbed one of the babysitters, and said, ‘Something’s wrong with Sebastian. Call the ambulance.’ The landlines were out because it had been raining. The babysitter got her cell phone, found one bar of signal, walking around in the driveway, one bar of signal, and called the ambulance. Meanwhile, my wife is kneeling next to me, holding my hand, watching me go in and out of consciousness. Every time I lost consciousness, she thought that’s it, he’s not coming back. And I kept coming back.
The ambulance ride took an hour. I hung on. I hung on for an hour, and we got to the hospital, and I went off a cliff. I went into end-stage hemorrhagic shock. My blood pressure was 60 over 40. I was convulsing with hypothermia. They rushed me into a trauma bay. The doctors knew immediately what was wrong. And one of the doctors came at me with this big needle and said, ‘I’d like permission to stick this through your neck into your jugular to transfuse you.’ I was going to need, ultimately, 10 units of blood to save my life. Other people’s blood saved my life. What he was going to do didn’t sound very pleasant. I said, ‘Why?’ In case there’s an emergency?’ he said. ‘This is the emergency, Mr. Younger.’ And he started to prep my neck.
Now, I have to tell you, at this point, I’m an atheist. And I’m not an atheist who’s like a little bit mystical or a little bit spiritual. I’m nothing, right? My father, who’s been dead eight years at this point, he was an atheist. Probably where I got it from. He was an atheist and a physicist. That’s like atheists squared. You’re going to need to know that for what I’m about to say.
I’m lying in the trauma bay. They’re prepping my neck, and suddenly, this black pit opens up underneath me, this howling void, this infinite abyss, and I’m getting pulled into it. And I don’t know why, but I know, I don’t know, I’m dying, but I know if you go into that, like a wounded animal, if you go into the black pit, you’re not coming out. That I knew. And then suddenly, above me, I see my father, slightly to my left. There he is, in his essence, just sort of an energy form, and he communicates to me, ‘It’s okay. You don’t have to fight it. You can come with me. I’ll take care of you. I know how to do this. It’s all right.’ I said, ‘Go with you? You’re dead. I’m just in for belly pain. You’ve got the wrong idea. I’m staying here.’ And I said to the doctor, Cause I’m still conscious, I’m still conversing. I said to the doctor, ‘You gotta hurry. I’m going right now. You’re losing me.’
They transfused me, stabilized me. They got me into the Interventional Radiology Suite, which is a kind of magic. Like, in the old days, to save my life, they would have opened up my abdomen, pushed my organs to the side, started rooting around, looking for the ruptured artery before I bled out. And the outcomes are so poor that, that had they had to resort to that this time with me, they would have brought my wife in to say goodbye before I went into surgery. But there’s Interventional Radiology now. And what they do with this is they push a catheter through an incision into your groin, through your femoral. Once they’re in your vascular system, they can push these flexible catheters anywhere. It’s like the interstate system. Where do you want to go in America right? Now, they’re in your body. Where do you want to go? They were trying to get to the rupture, right? They’re trying to get there and embolize it, plug it, stop it. Save my Life.
But because I have a very odd vascular anomaly—a ligament in the wrong place—that is what caused all these problems. They couldn’t get there. I wasn’t sedated because they didn’t dare, because my vital signs were so low. This went on for hours. I was in incredible pain. And I remember around 1:00 in the morning, one of the doctors saying, “Well, we tried. There’s nothing we can do.” And the other one said, “Yep.” That meant the OR. I didn’t know that, but it was the moment where I realized, the moment that I realized I’m not going to make it. I’m going to die.
Finally, they got through to me. Instead of sending me in for an emergency laparotomy and probably killing me trying to save me, what they ended up doing was going through my left wrist. It worked, and they saved my life. And now I’m in this vast darkness, this wild darkness that goes on and on. I’m in this darkness for a century, and then finally, in this darkness, I hear a voice. I hear the voice of a woman. I hear the voice of a woman with an incredibly harsh Boston accent. And I think, “That might not be a good sign. Like, where am I exactly?” I’m in the ICU, in the hospital, in Hyannis, Massachusetts. And the voice of an ICU nurse. She tells me that I almost died last night. It’s a miracle I’m here. And then she walks out of the room. And when she comes back an hour later, I mean, I thought, “Oh my God, my father. I saw my father. The pit. What happened? Where am I? Where did I go last night?” She comes back an hour later, says, “How are you doing?” I said, “Not that well. What you said was terrifying.” She said, “Try this. Try thinking about it, instead of thinking about it like something scary, try thinking about it like something sacred.”
For me, as an atheist, something sacred is anything, any information, any process that protects human dignity. I’ve been going to frontlines my whole life, coming back with information that might help save human lives. I went to the ultimate frontline, my own mortality. I was allowed to look over the edge. What did I see? Did I come back with sacred information that could help other people live their lives with more love, more courage, less fear, face their deaths with bravery and peace?
I came home. It was a lot like coming home from war. I drove up the long dirt driveway, pictures that my daughters had done, nailed to the trees. I’ve been in this incomprehensible place, and now I’m in this familiar place. It’s the best thing ever. So why am I sobbing? I didn’t understand it. I thought the hard part was over, but it wasn’t. It was just beginning. I’d had a classic NDE, near-death experience. I’d seen my dead father. Thousands of cases of this. I researched it, and I started to have this paranoid idea that I actually had died, that I had not made it, that everything from that moment in the ICU, in the ER, was a dying hallucination. I was the only one who didn’t know I was dead. Psychologists call this derealization. It’s a classic effect of trauma. It’s very, very common in people who have almost died.
At one point, I ran up to my wife and I said, I grabbed her by the arms, I said, I mean, I really slipped into a kind of madness, right? I said to my wife, “Just tell me I’m really here, right? That I survived, that you see me.” She said, “Yes, of course, sweetheart. You’re really here.” In my mind, I thought, “That’s just the kind of thing that a hallucination would say. Like, I’m on to you.” She finally asked, in frustration, “Do you feel lucky or unlucky that this happened?” I didn’t know how to answer. I felt like there was this dark raven was perched on my shoulder, cawing into my ear, “You’re going to die, you’re going to die.” But I also felt a little bit special. I’ve been allowed to look over the edge and come back. I finally reframed it in more mythic terms. Was I blessed or cursed? And you know, there’s nothing I can’t, no problem I can’t sort of nerd my way out of. And I thought, “Okay, maybe I’ll look up the origin of the word ‘blessing.’ Maybe that will help illuminate this conundrum that I’m in.” And indeed, it did. It comes from the Anglo-Saxon word for “blood.” The idea being that there is no blessing without a wounding, without a shedding of blood. They’re twins. Everything is a blessing and a curse. Life is deathis. You just, you get them together.
And thought of like that, I finally realized, Okay, I’m going to die. The Raven is right. I’m going to die. So how do I want to live? Yes, I might die today. So who do I want to be today if this might be my last day? The blessing and the curse. I’m still an atheist. Sometimes people ask if this experience diminished my fear of death. No, it was terrifying. It was scarier than an Ijaw warrior with a submachine gun telling me that he’ll be the one to kill me. It was scarier than that. But what did help was the wisdom of children. They see things clearly. They see the world as it is. That vision, that pure vision, is sacred because it’s true, and it helps protect human dignity. It helps us understand our lives.
At one point, I asked, I told my daughter how the solar system worked. The Earth is a sphere, the sun’s over here, it all goes around. She chewed on that for a while. She’s a smart little being. And a couple of days later, she said, “Daddy, I know why there’s night.” I said, “Really, sweetheart? Why is there night?” And she said, “So that other people can have day.” And then finally, I got it. I know why we die, so that other people can live. The world, the universe, cannot accommodate all of us forever. And if it could, it wouldn’t be a great idea. So, when we die, it’s not something that’s done to us. It’s not something that’s taken from us. It’s the final act of courage and love that we can perform for our children, for their generation, so that they can enjoy this beautiful world as we did. Thank you so much. [Music]
