BA
Skydiving: the parachute got tangled around my legs.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 10 December 2022 source ↗
The question
How close have you come to dying?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.
Others on this question
View all 209 →I was stabbed in my 20s. It was a late-night mugging and, while taking my wallet, they stabbed me in my chest.
Shaun Ryder
English singer
I had a gun shoved in my eyeball in New York by a crack dealer in the 1980s. I have also watched somebody next to me get shot in the head in a gun battle – that was in Jamaica in the early 1990s.
Noah Harari
Israeli historian and philosopher
I was almost run over by a bus when I was 13. And in 1991, in the Gulf war, an Iraqi missile hit close to my house.
Erin O'Connor
English model
An emergency landing in a snow storm in Philadelphia.
More from Bryan Adams
View profile →How big music companies have treated their artists in the digital age.
When I see videos of animal cruelty.
It can be as light as a feather or as heavy as a stone.
He came, he laughed, he left.
Paying my rent and being able to support my family from making music.
Walking with Eric Clapton’s tour manager Mick to meet Eric backstage, and when I met Eric I said, “Hi Mick.” I wanted to die.
More on death & what remains
- How would you want people to remember you? 213 answers
- What song would you want played at your funeral? 178 answers
- If you had only one day left, how would you spend it — and what would you deliberately avoid? 54 answers
- What do you believe happens when we die? 50 answers
- What would you most want to leave your children? 44 answers
- What kind of death would you consider a good one? 43 answers
Also answered this
Joan Jett, Courtney Pine, Ronnie Wood, Emma Bunton, Andi Oliver, Suzanne Vega
Search the directory for somebody in particular.
Explore further
- 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