I had a problem with my basil last week. One day, it was full and hearty, truly the best basil plant I’d ever cultivated (I got into pruning this year). Then, in the span of about 48 hours, it just died—the leaves wilted, the stems sagged, then the thing just keeled over. I know what you’re thinking—was I watering it properly? Enough sunlight? I was. There’s another basil plant right next to it, getting all the same light and water, and it’s fine. I was stumped, the folks at the plant store where I go to geek out on this stuff were stumped. This thing I’d dutifully cared for just died on me. I took it pretty hard.
Death, death, death. It’s on the menu this week, at least for me, at least when it comes to my media diet. Tough-guy journalist Sebastian Junger’s been in my feed. He’s out with a new book, In My Time of Dying, about his, uh, time of dying, making the rounds on various podcasts. Junger—a war correspondent famous for books like The Perfect Storm and the documentary Restrepo—is an atheist and staunch materialist, but when a pancreatic aneurysm landed him in the ER, his life hanging by a thread (or more specifically a few pints of blood), he had visions of his dead father putting him at ease and beckoning him to the great beyond. It’s the kind of thing folks like me and Junger don’t believe in—ghosts, heaven? GTFO. But Junger’s skepticism was challenged, so he went and talked to a bunch of doctors and physicists about all of it, to see what he might be missing.
I’m guessing this is what folks are getting at when they asked me about faith in the wake of my diagnosis. Because you do think and feel and sometimes see some wild stuff when you’re in that fog of a life-threatening experience. How does it change a person? What do they make of it? While I haven’t read his book, I get the sense from listening to him talk about it that Junger thinks these things are still largely a matter of neurochemicals and brain states and maybe some quantum physics, and whatever mystical layer we add on is a matter of personal preference. Well, that’s how I think about it at least.
Meanwhile, the great George Saunders wrote about a new film called Pig at the Crossing, directed by Buddhist teacher Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche. According to George, “[The film] is about the fact that, well, something happens to us after we die…and we don’t know what that might be - although it might have something to do with the way that we are living, right now.”
I also haven’t seen this film yet, but after writing about it, Saunders polled his massive readership about their experiences of the afterlife, posing the question, “Are there real-life experiences any of you have had that color your view of the afterlife?” To date, 290 people have left comments exploring this question. They are by turns illuminating, inspiring, and heartbreaking.
Healings readers will understand why I’m particularly attuned to these frequencies. I’m six installments into this new series where I ask people their own thoughts on death, after spending most of the last year writing about it in some form or another. You’d think after all this reflection I might have reached some big conclusions, but sometimes I think I might be more confused now than when I started.
For example, I was moved by this piece in The Cut that Danielle shared where the author meets someone in her new-mothers group who’s a devout Christian, and learns that her new friend’s fear of something terrible happening to her child is offset by the friend’s faith in Jesus, because she believes that if anything does happen, it’s part of God’s plan, that she and her child will be cared for by the holy trinity, etc. Similar to the author, I find myself coveting the kind of security that seems to come bundled with this kind of faith. Often, it seems like it’d be easier to just head on down to church, drink the kool aid, and consider this box checked. I know plenty of people (some of them family members) who’ve done just that, who’ve taken a kind of transactional approach to the question of death: Church + Bumper Stickers + Transphobia = VIP Passes to Heaven.
No thanks, obv (and yes, Thanksgivings do get awkward). I believe—sorry, I know—that Jesus was just a dude, seemingly a very gifted and charismatic and inspiring and loving dude, but a dude nonetheless. For that matter, so was the Buddha: Just a dude (actually a nepo baby) who did and said some things that were ultimately written about literally hundreds of years after he died, after being passed down through various oral traditions. Can you imagine the game of telephone that must have happened during that process? What we have then are stories, myths, campfire yarns—all of which are immensely helpful and comforting, but fall well short of any kind of real explanation of what death is.
As Junger puts it, “At one point, someone said to me, ‘You couldn't explain what happened to you in rational terms. Why didn't you turn to mystical terms?’ And I said, ‘Because rational terms is what an explanation is.’”
Honestly, sometimes I hate that I agree with this—it’d be so much easier if I didn’t! But I do. I suppose there are just some things I’m more certain of than others. But I’ll never know how that basil died.
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Healings is written by Garrett Kamps and edited by Tommy Craggs. Ayana H. Muwwakkil provides art direction.
Healings is about illness, recovery, spirituality, and related topics, and began in the summer of 2023 as a chronicle of Garrett’s battle with cancer. We make no guarantees that it will hold together, thematically speaking, now or ever.
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