The question
What do you believe happens when we die?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
A recurring late-stage question in The Guardian Q&A, with materially different answers on publisher-hosted pages.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
We watch over those we love.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 4 July 2026 source ↗
A nice long rest.
We don’t die. We change realms. Life is eternal. Living is not. Live while you are alive.
I cannot pretend to feel impartial about the colours. I rejoice with the brilliant ones, and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns. When I get to heaven I mean to spend a considerable portion of my first million years in painting, and so get to the bottom of the subject. But then I shall require a still gayer palette than I get here below. I expect orange and vermilion will be the darkest, dullest colours upon it, and beyond them there will be a whole range of wonderful new colours which will delight the celestial eye.
I really hope there is a big pearly gate.
Small, determined, lucky.
My parents died within four days of each other. I was engulfed as I ran from one bedside to another.
Did I behave in the right way?
For the words to fly from my fingers as just occasionally they do.
Safety or alarm, I can never decide which.
I bumped into an old schoolteacher and her even more ancient and deaf sister, and she shouted to her, “Remember Esther? Now she writes books … ABOUT HERSELF.”
Ben Okri, Johannes Radebe, Midge Ure, Sarah Perry, Neil Gaiman, Andrea Bocelli
Search the directory for somebody in particular.