Massive DMT release, your perception of time dilates, you realise you can fly, then it all goes black, and you start again, only this time … you’re a slug.
What happens when we die?
Question
What has been your biggest disappointment?
Failure & regret
Question
What scares you about getting older?
Time & hindsight
Question
What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
Time & hindsight
Question
Which living person do you most admire, and why?
Values & belief
Question
What is your greatest fear?
Identity & self
Question
What most recently made you cry?
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.
An accounting is given of our lives. Did you give more than you’ve taken? Hurt more people than you’ve helped?
The Q&A, The Guardian, 19 April 2025 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 54 →I don’t know, and I’m completely OK with not knowing.
Roger Ebert
Film critic
What I expect to happen is that my body will fail, my mind will cease to function and that will be that. My genes will not live on, because I have had no children. I am comforted by Richard Dawkins’ theory of memes. Those are mental units: thoughts, ideas, gestures, notions, songs, beliefs, rhymes, ideals, teachings, sayings, phrases, clichés that move from mind to mind as genes move from body to body. After a lifetime of writing, teaching, broadcasting and telling too many jokes, I will leave behind more memes than many. They will all also eventually die, but so it goes.
The worms get to feast.
More from Gregory Porter
View profile →The Covid years. My life is diminished since then. I lost my brother. My children lost some social expression, and we are still recovering from that.
Losing the people that I love.
Redemption. People can be redeemed, goals can be redeemed.
Barack Obama, for his humility and grace in the face of enormous difficulty.
Immunity to cruelty.
Telling a story to my son about my brother.
More on death & what remains
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- What song would you like played at your funeral? 179 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? 50 answers
- How would you like to die? 44 answers
Also answered this
Richard Eyre, Kerry Godliman, Bobbi Brown, Nuala McGovern, Kate Humble, Jon Sopel
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- All death & what remains questions
- The The Q&A questionnaire — 25 questions from the same format
- Explore the archive — by field, age, era, and subject