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 Mariella Frostrup said elsewhere, not written here
I’ve had a few hairy scrapes as a scuba diver.

The Q&A, The Guardian, 4 November 2023 source ↗

Others on this question

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Tom Lubbock Art critic
It is a very rare affliction. A GP would expect to meet it once in a career and this form of brain cancer is unpredictable and dangerous. Usually, this tumour might give you only a two-year span since its discovery. I have had two operations and one course of radiotherapy and now three chemotherapies (one currently starting). My death is, in a sense, imminent. I say to myself: I am dying. Something in my head is hurrying to kill me.
Recorded The Observer, from the journals he kept between 2008 and 2010; published on the Guardian website under the title 'When Words Failed Me', 7 November 2010 source ↗
Suzanne Vega American singer-songwriter
A death threat at Glastonbury festival in 1989. The police told me not to go on, but I said I had to because I was headlining. So I wore a bullet-proof vest. It seemed unlikely that I would be assassinated, but it was shocking and very stressful.
Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 9 September 2017 source ↗
Tess Daly English television presenter
On a motorway three years ago. An HGV hadn’t seen me and pulled out. My father-in-law’s a truck driver and he said black cars are not very visible. I don’t drive them any more.
Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 17 December 2016 source ↗

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