My parents died within four days of each other. I was engulfed as I ran from one bedside to another.
How close have you come to death?
Question
Which living person do you most admire, and why?
Values & belief
Question
What has been your biggest disappointment?
Failure & regret
Question
Which moment embarrassed you most?
Failure & regret
Question
What would you like to be remembered for?
Death & what remains
Question
What most recently made you cry?
Identity & self
Question
What does love feel like?
Relationships
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.
After a significant traumatic experience when I was looking for reasons to stay alive.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 10 May 2025 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 210 →
Jenny Diski
Novelist and essayist
The print size in my mind decreased with time’s incremental decline, and as I arrived at the last word – weeks – it suddenly struck me, with all the force of the fullest sense of the word ‘struck’, that this could actually be his answer and not just the logical next time period in my sentence. Every cell in my body, except those responsible for maintaining a reasonable, calm exterior, was now lindy-hopping at that possibility, the only one that hadn’t occurred to me until that moment.
Laurence Fox
English actor and activist
A motorbike crash. I broke my shoulder and ribs and was so scared I didn’t ride for two years.
Isabelle Huppert
French actress
At each of my theatre premieres.
More from Walton Goggins
View profile →My wife, because of the lessons we’ve learned and what we have overcome over the course of our time together.
Being absent from my son’s life when I’m at work.
Passing wind on camera. I was doing a rather large movie and it was a closeup.
As one of a kind.
Last night, getting ready for a scene.
It is obsessive, it is glorious, it is everything that we’re put on this Earth to feel, all at once.
More on death & what remains
- What would you like to be remembered for? 220 answers
- 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 happens when we die? 53 answers
- What would you like to leave your children? 48 answers
- How would you like to die? 44 answers
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