For years as an award-winning war reporter, Sebastian Junger traveled to many front lines and frequently put his life at risk. Yet the closest he ever came to death was the summer of 2020 while spending a quiet afternoon with his wife and two young children. Crippled by abdominal pain, Junger was rushed to the hospital by ambulance. Once there, he began slipping away. As blackness encroached, he was visited by his dead father, inviting Junger to join him. That was the last thing Junger remembered until he came to the next day when he was told he had suffered a ruptured aneurysm that he should not have survived. This experience spurred Junger --- a confirmed atheist raised by his physicist father to respect the empirical --- to undertake a scientific, philosophical and deeply personal examination of mortality and what happens after we die.
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