By Miriam R. Kramer

January can be dreary—the beginning of a slog towards spring. I have always looked at it as a time for enthralling, escapist fare. When I heard about Sebastian Junger’s In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face With the Idea of an Afterlife, however, I sidestepped into a fascinating memoir about his near-death experience (NDE). Then I dove into From Here to Eternity by L.A. mortician and amateur anthropologist Caitlin Doughty, which looks at the way humans handle death around the world, particularly in a non-Western context. In The Year of Magical Thinking, the brilliant Joan Didion writes about coming to terms with her husband dying. These three remarkable works approach difficult terrain from strikingly different angles. They also are all, ironically, reassuring in their clear-eyed approach to the one event none of us can avoid.

What unites them is their honesty, their curiosity, and their ability to illuminate the emotional, cultural, and existential dimensions of mortality. Read together, they form a kind of triptych: the near‑death experience, the cultural encounter with death, and the intimate aftermath of loss. Each book stands powerfully on its own, but in conversation with one another, they offer a surprisingly hopeful and deeply human exploration of what it means to live with the knowledge of death.

Sebastian Junger’s In My Time of Dying is the most immediate of the three, a gripping account of his own brush with death after a ruptured aneurysm. Junger has long been known for his immersive, clear-eyed journalism, but here he turns his clinical eye inward. What makes this work so compelling is not just the emergency, though he describes it with vivid clarity, but the philosophical questions it forces him to confront. Having grown up with his father’s atheism, he begins to question all his preconceptions. Those writing about NDEs can sound like hucksters: Junger is anything but.

Junger writes with a stripped‑down sincerity. He examines the boundary between life and death with the same rigor he applied as a war reporter, yet his tone is more vulnerable, more searching. His memoir becomes a meditation on connection: to family, to the people who saved him, and to the mysterious sense of his deceased father’s presence beckoning him towards death. Rather than offering easy answers, Junger invites readers into his uncertainty.

If Junger’s book is a personal reckoning, Caitlin Doughty’s From Here to Eternity is a cultural odyssey. A mortician and advocate for death acceptance, Doughty travels the world to explore how different societies care for their dead. Her tone is warm, curious, and often funny. What makes the book so refreshing is Doughty’s refusal to treat death as taboo. Instead, she approaches each death ritual with respect and interest, whether she’s witnessing open‑air pyres in Colorado, participating in a Japanese bone‑picking ceremony, or visiting a community in Indonesia that keeps the bodies of loved ones in their homes for years.

Through these encounters, Doughty gently challenges Western norms around death, particularly the tendency to outsource the entire process to professionals and hide it from view. Her argument is not prescriptive but invitational: there are many ways to honor the dead, and reconnecting with these practices can make death less frightening and more meaningful. She concludes that a more intimate, interactive approach actually provides more care for and comfort to the bereaved. Her book is uplifting because it expands the reader’s imagination. It suggests that death, far from being a purely tragic event, can also promote beauty, creativity, and communal care.

Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking brings the focus back to the personal, but in a different register than Junger’s. Didion’s memoir of grief after the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, is a masterpiece of emotional precision. Her prose is typically gorgeous and spare. Didion captures the surreal, disorienting quality of early grief: the way the mind loops, bargains, and clings to impossible hopes. Her “magical thinking,” such as the belief that her husband might return if she just keeps his shoes, becomes a window into the irrational logic of mourning.

What makes the book so powerful is Didion’s refusal to sentimentalize her experience. I read her Booker Prize–winning memoir expecting to be depressed. Instead, I came away invigorated and comforted. She writes with clarity, intelligence, and a fierce honesty about the ways grief reshapes one’s sense of time, memory, and identity. Yet for all its sorrow, her memoir is not bleak. It is a testament to love: the depth of her grief reflects the depth of her connection.

Taken together, these three books offer a remarkably holistic exploration of death. Each book illuminates a different facet of the human experience, yet all three share a commitment to truthfulness and a belief that facing death directly can enrich our lives.

What makes this trio especially valuable is the sense of empowerment they collectively offer. Rather than treating death as something to fear or avoid, they encourage readers to engage with it thoughtfully. Junger’s near‑death experience underscores his vulnerability and the overwhelming questions a near-death experience provokes in him. Doughty’s global tour reveals that there is no right way to mourn or memorialize, only practices that reflect what a community values. Didion’s memoir reminds us that grief, though painful, is also a profound expression of love and a road for coming to terms with loss. These concepts are not new, but the authors handle them in a respectful, well-written fashion that fully engages the reader. In doing so, they offer something rare: a sense of connection across the boundaries of experience, culture, and loss.

About the Author: Miriam Kramer worked at Olsson’s Books & Records before it closed in 2008, welcoming Old Town, Alexandria, residents to a unique place where employees with encyclopedic knowledge of literature and music enriched the community. As a global nomad, she has lived, studied, or worked in diverse countries overseas. With her experience writing and studying international affairs, she has promoted democracy, international media, the arts, peace building, and citizen diplomacy during her career.