The question
What kind of death would you consider a good one?Originally asked
Vanity Fair, to its interview subject, The Proust Questionnaire
A fixed final question in Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire, repeated verbatim across respondent pages.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Sometimes when I’m on a plane, as I often am, the weather is rough and we’re worried about going down. I think: If I hold the hand of the person next to me, I’ll be holding everyone’s hand. Like my dear friend, the late Wilma Mankiller, principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, I want to know: I’m going to the other side of the mountain.
Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, 24 September 2020 source ↗
I don’t care as long as Jeffrey and I go together and we end up in a big suite with a view of the ocean.
Like Joel McCrea’s character at the end of the movie Ride the High Country. (He says something about “entering his house justified,” sits up to take a last look at the scenery, then rolls contentedly out of the frame.) Or like Bill Nighy’s character at the end of our film Living.
Quickly and by surprise. I don’t want the specter of death to linger.
How doesn’t matter—it’s when that matters. When I’m ready!
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.
Seeing the future die, from Bobby Kennedy to dear friends.
Dying just a millisecond before I was about to say something I really wanted the people I love to hear.
I behaved badly with two old lovers. Years later, when I took one to lunch to apologise, it made it worse.
Dr Denis Mukwege, because he is to sexualised violence against females what Mandela was to apartheid.
I haven’t done it yet.
Al Franken, Simon Boas, John Lewis, Joan Rivers, Diane Keaton, Ina Garten
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