Death & what remains

How would you like to die?

43 answers answered between 2010 and 2024 one of 5 in The Proust Questionnaire

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.

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Public figures who have answered a question like this elsewhere. Quoted from the source shown, not written for FLAPSS.

Read by field Everyone Science and medicine 2 Arts and letters 36 Politics and public life 4 Business and finance 1
Read by age Any age In their forties 4 In their fifties 4 In their sixties 17 Seventy and beyond 18
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Terry Pratchett Novelist
I remember what George said and vowed that rather than let Alzheimer's take me, I would take it. I would live my life as ever to the full and die, before the disease mounted its last attack, in my own home, in a chair on the lawn, with a brandy in my hand to wash down whatever modern version of the "Brompton cocktail" some helpful medic could supply. And with Thomas Tallis on my iPod, I would shake hands with Death.

Recorded Edited extract from the Richard Dimbleby Lecture, Shaking Hands With Death, Royal College of Physicians, broadcast on BBC1 on 1 February 2010, The Guardian, 2 February 2010 source ↗

Christopher Hitchens Essayist, critic and journalist
And even if my voice goes before I do, I shall continue to write polemics against religious delusions, at least until it’s hello darkness my old friend. In which case, why not cancer of the brain? As a terrified, half-aware imbecile, I might even scream for a priest at the close of business, though I hereby state while I am still lucid that the entity thus humiliating itself would not in fact be “me.” (Bear this in mind, in case of any later rumors or fabrications.)

Recorded Vanity Fair, 2 September 2010 source ↗

Danielle Steel Novelist
Peacefully, in good physical health, sound of mind, still active, at a great age, with my children around me.

Recorded Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, 26 June 2012 source ↗

Dolly Parton American singer-songwriter, actress and businesswoman
Singing onstage—and everyone walking around me saying, “Look how happy she looks.”

Recorded Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, 24 October 2012 source ↗

Robert De Niro Actor
In my sleep. And I don’t think about it. It’ll be what it’ll be.

Recorded Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, 19 February 2013 source ↗

T Bone Burnett Musician and record producer
I would like to die in good health, at an old age, in a house on a mountain that looks out over the ocean, dreaming about everyone and everything I have had the impossible good fortune to have loved. Maybe Ralph Stanley is singing “Angel Band.”

Recorded Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, 17 December 2013 source ↗

Diane Keaton Actor and director
Like? I have no soft spot, fondness, admiration, respect, attraction, or esteem for death. I am not taken with it or infatuated by it. I carry no torch, have no crush, take no shine to the word or action of death. I don’t have the hots for it, and I don’t dig it, either.

Recorded Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, 5 May 2014 source ↗

Willem Dafoe Actor
How doesn’t matter—it’s when that matters. When I’m ready!

Recorded Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, 24 June 2014 source ↗

Joan Rivers Comedian
Coming offstage after a five-minute standing ovation, falling into the arms of my lover, and having the doctor look at me and say, “This is impossible! She looks much too young to go!”

Recorded Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, 4 September 2014 source ↗

Jenny Diski Novelist and essayist
One thing I state as soon as we’re out of the door: ‘Under no circumstances is anyone to say that I lost a battle with cancer. Or that I bore it bravely. I am not fighting, losing, winning or bearing.’ I will not personify the cancer cells inside me in any form. I reject all metaphors of attack or enmity in the midst, and will have nothing whatever to do with any notion of desert, punishment, fairness or unfairness, or any kind of moral causality.

Recorded London Review of Books, 11 September 2014 source ↗

Diana Athill Editor and memoirist
That process depends on what you are dying of. The body can fail in ways that are extremely distressing, slowly and painfully, demanding much stoicism, or it can switch off with little more than a flash of dizziness. In my family we seem to have been uncommonly lucky in that respect. There was the 82-year-old uncle who was at a meet of the Norwich Stag Hounds, enjoying a drink with friends, when crash! And he fell off his horse, dead. There was the cousin in her eighties who fell dead as she was filling a kettle to make tea, and the other cousin, 98, who slipped away so gently that the sister who was holding her hand didn’t realise that she had stopped breathing.

Recorded The Guardian, 23 September 2014 source ↗

Stephen Fry Actor, writer and broadcaster
Over two weeks, in a pleasant fug of palliative morphine if necessary. Just time to say a cheerful good-bye to everyone.

Recorded Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, 10 June 2015 source ↗

Oliver Sacks Neurologist and writer
It was this celestial splendor that suddenly made me realize how little time, how little life, I had left. My sense of the heavens’ beauty, of eternity, was inseparably mixed for me with a sense of transience — and death. ... I told my friends Kate and Allen, “I would like to see such a sky again when I am dying.” “We’ll wheel you outside,” they said.

Recorded The New York Times, Sunday Review, 24 July 2015 source ↗

John Mellencamp Singer and songwriter
I need a long and lingering death to make sure that I have time to have a deathbed conversion.

Recorded Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, 18 December 2015 source ↗

Sally Field Actor
When I’m extremely old during a huge family celebration where everyone is playing games and giving pre-written toasts … to me.

Recorded Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, 10 March 2016 source ↗

Cory Taylor Novelist and screenwriter
As far as I can tell, I’ll either succumb to some opportunistic infection, for which I’ve refused antibiotics in advance, or, having similarly declined forced feeding, I’ll starve to death. ... I don’t know how long it takes to die of starvation, or whether it hurts, but I dread it, just as I dread my sons watching me go like that. Because that is what they will remember, their mother reduced to a bag of bones.

Recorded Edited extract from Dying: A Memoir, Text Publishing, The Guardian, 17 May 2016 source ↗

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