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When looking to understand something scary or unknown, it always helps to look up reviews from people who have personally experienced it. When it comes to dying, this can get kind of tricky, on account of obvious, but we can at least get the scoop from those who’ve experienced a near-death experience. Like, say Jeremy Renner.
Renner, after all, came about as close to dying as it’s possible to get on New Year’s Day 2023, when a 7-ton Sno-Cat drove over him, breaking something like a sixth of all the bones in his body. (In fact, as far as Renner’s concerned, he did die: His new memoir, My Next Breath, states that he died briefly about half an hour after the accident.) And, hey, great news: Dying, at least dying as Jeremy Renner, sounds pretty kickass.
This is per an interview Renner gave this week to Kelly Ripa, in which he branched out from his usual past-times (acting, making music, app inspiration) to get more verbose about the cessation of existence than you usually hear from a former Avenger. Renner described the sensation of passing into the great beyond as “a great relief. It’s a wonderful, wonderful relief to be removed from your body,” he told Ripa. “It is the most exhilarating peace you could ever feel. You don’t see anything but what’s in your mind’s eye. Like, you’re the atoms of who you are, the DNA, your spirit. It’s the highest adrenaline rush, but the peace that comes with it… it’s magnificent. It’s so magical.” Which is a 5-star Letterboxd review if we’ve ever seen one, really. (Do you want more Jeremy Renner death poetry? Here’s a bit from the book: “I could see my lifetime. I could see everything all at once. In death, there was no time, no time at all, yet it was also all time and forever.” )
Life, meanwhile, catches way more flak in Renner’s estimation. “I didn’t want to come back. I remember I was brought back and I was so pissed off. I came back, I’m like, ‘Aww!’ I came back and saw [my] eyeball and I’m like, ‘Oh shit, I’m back.’” (In case you do not remember all the details of Renner’s genuinely, hideously horrifying accident, his eye was out of his socket by the time the giant vehicle was done with him.) “Saw my legs. I’m like, ‘Yeah, that’s gonna hurt later.’ I’m like, ‘All right, let me continue to breathe.’”
Renner notes that the whole experience has kind of put him in a buyer’s market when it comes to the concept of continued existence. Being “a man that didn’t want to come back” has made him now “really be able to be back here and live it on my terms as the captain of my own ship. And get on it or off it, I don’t give a fuck. I’m going to live life on my own terms and for nobody else. [It’s] very clear. The white noise is ripped away.”
[via Variety]
