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 Christopher Eccleston said elsewhere, not written here
During my severe clinical depression in 2016. I was at Piccadilly station in Manchester and a train was coming.

The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 5 October 2019 source ↗

Others on this question

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Ed Harris American actor and director
Near head-on collision driving from Oklahoma to California back in the 70s.
Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 11 August 2007 source ↗
Paul Kalanithi Neurosurgeon and writer
I rolled back the images. Looked again. There it was. A new tumor, large, filling my right middle lobe. It looked, oddly, like a full moon having almost cleared the horizon. Going back to the old images, I could make out the faintest trace of it, a ghostly harbinger now brought fully into the world. I was neither angry nor scared. It simply was. It was a fact about the world, like the distance from the sun to the Earth.
Recorded The New Yorker, Page-Turner — an excerpt from When Breath Becomes Air, 11 January 2016 source ↗
Mo Farah British track and field athlete
When I was a kid, travelling from Ethiopia to the UK, the plane door opened, the oxygen masks came down and the plane did an emergency landing in Egypt.
Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 27 April 2019 source ↗
Kate Nash British musician
I had heart surgery when I was 17. The other time was when I fell off my piano. My head was an inch away from a metal step.
Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 25 May 2019 source ↗

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