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What happens when we die?
Question
How close have you come to death?
Death & what remains
Question
What is the worst job you have done?
Craft & work
Question
What scares you about getting older?
Time & hindsight
Question
What would you like to leave your children?
Death & what remains
Question
What has been your biggest disappointment?
Failure & regret
Question
Which trait do you most dislike in yourself?
Identity & self
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 become fertiliser.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 12 October 2024 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 51 →The rest is silence.
Nothing at all.
Tony Judt
Historian and essayist
I don't believe in an afterlife. I don't believe in a single or multiple godhead. I respect people who do, but I don't believe it myself. But there's a big but which enters in here. I am much more conscious than I ever was, for obvious reasons, of what it will mean to people left behind once I'm dead. It won't mean anything for me. But it will mean a lot to them. ... So in one curious way I've come to believe in the afterlife as a place where I still have moral responsibilities, just as I do in this life except that I can only exercise them before I get there. Once I get there, it'll be too late.
More from Jon Sopel
View profile →I’ve had motorcycle accidents – I had one where I ended up in intensive care. But if you are on a frontline – which I have been – and people start shooting at you – which they have done – you put yourself in quite considerable danger. So: on a moving frontline in northern Afghanistan in 2001.
Children’s underwear department at Marks & Spencer, Oxford Circus. I was 16 years old, earning money in my summer holidays.
Every time I play tennis I come back with a fresh injury.
Spirit of adventure and kindness.
Not being a professional footballer.
Impatience and vanity.
More on death & what remains
- What would you like to be remembered for? 214 answers
- How close have you come to death? 209 answers
- What song would you like played at your funeral? 178 answers
- If you had only one day left to live, how would you spend it — and what would you deliberately avoid doing? 54 answers
- What would you like to leave your children? 44 answers
- How would you like to die? 44 answers
Also answered this
Jon Snow, Winston Churchill, Billy Crudup, Jason Donovan, Su Pollard, Hugh Skinner
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