Jeremy Renner reflects on near-death experience: “I could see everything all at once”
Hollywood actor Jeremy Renner has revealed in his new memoir that he is “sure” he died momentarily after being run over by a snowplough in 2023.
On January 1st 2023, Renner was run over by his snowplough as he attempted to assist his 27-year-old nephew, Alex Fries, freeing a pickup truck stuck in the snow. At one point, Renner exited his vehicle to check on Fries. However, his truck was still moving. He was hit by the Sno-Cat and got stuck under its tread, trying to stop it from hitting his nephew.
After the accident, Renner was hospitalised for blunt chest trauma and orthopaedic injuries, with him later revealing that over 30 bones were broken. Renner stated, “I know I died – in fact, I’m sure of it,” referring to over 30 minutes spent lying in the ice, waiting for first responders.
Renner later learned from EMTs that his “heart rate had bottomed out at 18,” making him “basically dead.”
The details of his near-death experience as described in his new memoir, My Next Breath, are startlingly poetic. “In death there was no time, no time at all, yet it was also all time and forever,” he said, describing an “exhilarating peace”. He also described the spiritual experience of feeling a “constantly connected, beautiful and fantastic energy.”
His description of a liminal space continued. According to Renner, 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.” Despite this sounding peaceful, Renner recalled returning to life after a nameless force instructed him not to “let go.”
When Renner returned to The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon for the first time since the incident, he spoke of a new positivity in life. The Hawkeye star told Fallon: “There are so many great gifts of being tested to your limits, right? Your physical limits, your spiritual limits, emotional limits. I won’t have a bad day for the rest of my life. It’s impossible. There’s that gift.”
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