Helen George: 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 Helen George said elsewhere, not written here

When I was young, I was pretty reckless – my 20s were quite hedonistic. I don’t know whether I’ve been close to death, but I may have been without realising.

The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 28 January 2023 source ↗

Others on this question

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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 ↗

Eleanor Tomlinson English actress

A horse-riding accident when I was about 15.

Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 25 May 2024 source ↗

Jo Nesbø Norwegian writer and musician

Rock climbing in Oslo. During abseiling, I hadn’t tied a knot at the end of the rope and almost slid out. I saw the end of the rope at the last second, so I stopped abseiling.

Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 4 April 2026 source ↗

Peter Capaldi Actor and director

Death is always close.

Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 19 June 2021 source ↗