I’d like to die anytime after the age of 90—in my sleep!
Originally asked
Vanity Fair, to its interview subject, The Proust Questionnaire
A fixed final question in Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire, repeated verbatim across respondent pages.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Emma Barnett, BBC Radio 4, Today, as published by BBC News, 4 July 2024 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 44 →At the right time, and like my father—utterly without fear or pain, at home, with all whom I love. It was his last lesson as a parent to me.
In my sleep in my 90s, after a great gig.
I would like to die in good health, at an old age, in a house on a mountain that looks out over the ocean, dreaming about everyone and everything I have had the impossible good fortune to have loved. Maybe Ralph Stanley is singing “Angel Band.”
More from Simon Boas
View profile →All our tombs will be unvisited in a few years - all our actions will mostly be unremembered - but the smile you gave the checkout lady or the kind words you gave to a stranger in the street could still be rippling forward. We all have that opportunity and it's a huge power.
All our lives are little books - but they're not someone else's complete book. You're a chapter or a page or a footnote in someone else's life and they are going to keep writing beautiful chapters when you are gone. And those green shoots can grow around grief and put it in perspective. I hope people will think, "I'm glad I read that - Simon's story". And just because it's over, doesn't mean it's gone.
I'm sort of - not looking forward to my final day - of course that's the wrong way to see it. But I'm kind of curious about it, and I'm happy and I'm ready. As Julian of Norwich said: "All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.
More on death & what remains
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- What song would you like played at your funeral? 178 answers
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- What happens when we die? 51 answers
- What would you like to leave your children? 44 answers
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Gloria Steinem, John Lewis, Al Franken, Audra McDonald, Terry Pratchett, George Saunders
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