Noel Clarke: How close have you come to death?

Originally asked

The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A

A recurring Guardian Q&A prompt asked directly across respondents and years.

You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.

Recorded Noel Clarke said elsewhere, not written here

A car crash in the Utah mountains in 2005. We were driving from Arizona to Salt Lake City to go to a basketball game and the car slipped on black ice and we skidded off the motorway, flipped over and rolled down a ravine. The police officer said it was the worst accident he’d seen in 18 years when nobody died.

The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 3 April 2021 source ↗

Others on this question

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Meera Syal British writer and actress

On a school trip to Wales when I was 12. My canoe capsized and got stuck upside down next to a rock. I was underwater for about 30 seconds but it felt a lot longer.

Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 14 April 2018 source ↗

Gloria Steinem Writer and feminist organiser

I’ve had cancer three times, but never felt close to death except when I walked between parked cars on my street and a car sped past my nose.

Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 4 March 2017 source ↗

Paul Kalanithi Neurosurgeon and writer

I rolled back the images. Looked again. There it was. A new tumor, large, filling my right middle lobe. It looked, oddly, like a full moon having almost cleared the horizon. Going back to the old images, I could make out the faintest trace of it, a ghostly harbinger now brought fully into the world. I was neither angry nor scared. It simply was. It was a fact about the world, like the distance from the sun to the Earth.

Recorded The New Yorker, Page-Turner — an excerpt from When Breath Becomes Air, 11 January 2016 source ↗

Esther Freud