My Next Breath by Jeremy Renner: I died ... and now I know death is nothing to fear

He has played some very tough guys in his glittering Hollywood career has Jeremy Renner; men like the adrenaline-fuelled bomb disposal expert in the Oscar-laden The Hurt Locker or the tough but deeply loyal bank robber in The Town, for which he was Oscar nominated again.

He was even heir to the Jason Bourne franchise in the The Bourne Legacy. But it’s not just on the big screen. Renner is the toughest of men in real life too.

And as he recounts in this remarkable, profound memoir he even has a brush with eternity, an encounter that will be one of the most moving passages you will read anywhere this year.

On New Year’s Day 2023 a large gathering of the Renner clan – his siblings, family and friends – had assembled at his mountain lodge in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, to celebrate the Christmas holidays. Hemmed in by an enormous storm, finally the weather clears and Renner, accompanied by his nephew Alex, age 27 at the time, sets out on this crisp-blue mountain morning to clear the terrain with his 14,000lb industrial snow-clearing machine.

He makes one mistake – he fails to press the handbrake – and watches as the massive vehicle slides towards Alex. He leaps on board to try to stop it, but slips and falls, to be crushed under the huge tracks of the snow plough as it passes over him.

It is this horrific, unimaginable accident and its aftermath that form the core of this extraordinary, deeply affecting book.

The scale of his injuries is mind-boggling. He had broken more than 38 bones, including six ribs in 14 places, and lost several litres of blood. His face and head were brutalised, and he could see his left eye with his right eye.

But it is below freezing out on the ice and Renner, close to death, his body in shock, has to keep breathing. Two neighbours, Rich and Barb, come to help and call for helicopter rescue.

But lying broken out on the ice, Renner knows that without breathing he will die. Each breath is harder and harder, each broken bone screaming out in agony. He knows he mustn’t stop, or pass out. He has to keep breathing. Anybody who has just cracked one rib knows how painful each and every breath can be. Imagine that with six broken ribs.

As the killing cold begins to dangerously bite, Barb is holding his head and talking constantly. ‘Just keep breathing,’ she says. ‘Take shallow breaths. Stay with us. Keep your eyes open,’ rubbing his forehead and his hands just trying to keep him alert. But then she notices the colour of his skin begin to change and Renner closes his eyes.

Later Barb is to say, ‘I wouldn’t take my eyes off him because I didn’t want him to drift off. Then he turned this grey-green colour. I lost him for a second. He closed his eyes. I really feel he did pass away for a couple of seconds.’

It is here that we find the mystical heart of this wonderful, gripping story. For most of us the edge of our own lives will come only once. Will we be terrified, glad, guilty? Jeremy Renner is in the unique position of knowing. This is what he says. ‘I know I died – in fact I’m sure of it.’ When the paramedics arrived they noted his heart rate had bottomed out at 18 beats a minute – at that rate, as he puts it, ‘you’re basically dead.’

So what was it like? What follows is just a small flavour of what Renner experienced. ‘When I died, what I felt was energy, a constantly connected, beautiful and fantastic energy. There was no time, place, or space and nothing to see, except a kind of electric two-way vision made from strands of that inconceivable energy, like the whipping lines of cars’ tail lights photographed by a time lapse camera.

‘I was in space: no sound, no wind, nothing save this extraordinary electricity by which I am connected to everybody and anything, anyone and everything. I am in every given moment, in one instant, magnified to a number ungovernable by math.

‘What came to me on that ice was an exhilarating peace, the most profound adrenaline rush, yet an entirely tranquil one at the same time... It was an entirely beautiful place filled with knowable magic. It pulses, it floats; it is beyond language, beyond thought, beyond reason, a place of pure feeling... I knew then as I know now to this day and will always know: Death is not something to be afraid of.’

As he slowly returns to Barb and Alex on the ice he realises: ‘Love, here on earth, is our only currency; it is our energy and our existence and we take that energy with us into perpetuity... Something else; dying has left me with this simple but imperative thought – live your life now...’

He goes on: ‘What I’d just been through – my death – proved to me something I’d always intuited, which is that whatever we are goes beyond our galaxies, and it keeps going, repeating to the nth degree. Love. That’s what lasts. That’s what wins. Always.’

Then, Renner hears the helicopter blades of the air ambulance and as he takes each agonising breath he knows the burden of staying alive will be borne by others, not just Barb, her husband Rich and Alex. Renner takes us with characteristic gusto through his recovery, recuperation and rehabilitation. And it is astonishingly rapid, though he admits he is the world’s worst patient.

After multiple surgeries and two blood transfusions, he was discharged from the Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles on January 13, 2023, after 12 days in hospital. ‘I haven’t spent a single night in a hospital since,’ he says with some pride. The Jeremy Renner who emerges from this book is funny, generous, highly admirable, and widely liked. He’s a talented sportsman and musician, and clearly a very good writer.

His Rennervation project acquires and rehabilitates old trucks, ambulances, buses and other large decommissioned vehicles, repurposing them and giving them to communities that need them: a dance studio in Mexico, a water treatment centre in India.

He is devoted to his vast family – he is one of seven children – and especially his daughter Ava, to whom this compelling, and deeply inspiring book is dedicated. She must be very honoured. It is a magnificent story.