In My Time of Dying How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

I'm still working on that. I'm pretty sure I didn't, but that's one of the great mysteries is how do we know we're here?

I say in my book, we might understand reality like a dog understands a television screen. There's no concept of the greater reality that's producing the image that the dog sees, that we see.

I don't go to church, but I believe that the greatest worship of what some people call God's creation, which is the world and life, and what atheists just call creation, the greatest worship of that is being fully engaged in your life, in the moments of your life, in all of its emotional reality.

None of us know that this isn't our last day. No one in this room, no one on this earth knows this isn't their last day. So, who do you want to be on your last day? Be that person on every day.

And if you're not sufficiently terrified, life isn't going to be sufficiently miraculous and vice versa. And so that to me is how one lives one's life.

He's written a whole new book about it. It's called In My Time of Dying, How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife.

So the name of my book is In My Time of Dying. And the subtitle is How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife.

I'm now much older than he was that night, and I finally understand how much my father must have trusted me on that trip, how much he must have loved me. We're all on the side of a mountain shocked by how fast it's gotten dark. The only question is whether we're with the people we love or not. There is no other thing, no belief or religion or faith. There is just that, just the knowledge that when we finally close our eyes, someone will be there to watch over us as we head into that great soaring night.

I'm now much older than he was that night, and I finally understand how much my father must have trusted me on that trip, how much he must have loved me.

It's a story he tells in his new book In My Time of Dying and a topic we get into in this conversation.

And so that my book in my time of dying about this process was an attempt to answer, to do what she told me to do, to think about it as something sacred and also to explain in rational terms what the hell I saw as I was dying.