I like the idea of being atoms that other people can breathe in, and fabulous worm food.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 21 October 2023 source ↗
The question
What do you believe happens when we die?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.
Others on this question
View all 50 →Other people get sad.
I think that we dissolve into the soil and new things sprout from that.
Disneyland x a million.
I don’t know and I don’t really care – I’ll be dead.
More from Neil Gaiman
View profile →As someone who left the world slightly more interesting than he found it.
The idiocy of going to Skye from New Zealand in April 2020. All of a sudden, I’m turning on the news and hearing myself as an item. I have never been more mortified.
And when things get tough, this is what you should do. Make good art. I’m serious. Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art. Somebody on the Internet thinks what you do is stupid or evil or it’s all been done before? Make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, and eventually time will take the sting away, but that doesn’t matter. Do what only you do best. Make good art.
Recorded
134th Commencement, University of the Arts, Philadelphia, University of the Arts (uarts.edu), via the Internet Archive, 17 May 2012
source ↗
I’ve never read Proust.
My kids, and getting some of the stories I had in my head on to paper in a way that wasn’t too far removed from the thing I dreamed about writing.
Mostly the pain. I don’t want to be trapped in a body that hurts.
More on death & what remains
- How would you want people to remember you? 213 answers
- How close have you come to dying? 209 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 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
Tony Judt, Jenny Diski, Sam Ryder, Layton Williams, Hugh Skinner, Marcus Brigstocke
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