Bernadine Evaristo: 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 Bernadine Evaristo said elsewhere, not written here

Travelling Europe with a friend, when I was 29. She was driving and the brakes went, on one of those vertiginous Italian mountains. It was terrifying for the 20 minutes it took to coast down the mountain.

The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 25 July 2020 source ↗

Others on this question

View all 209 →

Fatima Bhutto Pakistani writer

I don’t know. I prefer it that way.

Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 13 February 2021 source ↗

Charles Dance British actor

I’m getting closer all the time.

Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 30 November 2024 source ↗

Christopher Hitchens Essayist, critic and journalist

I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death. But nothing prepared me for the early morning last June when I came to consciousness feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse. The whole cave of my chest and thorax seemed to have been hollowed out and then refilled with slow-drying cement. I could faintly hear myself breathe but could not manage to inflate my lungs. My heart was beating either much too much or much too little. Any movement, however slight, required forethought and planning.

Recorded Vanity Fair, 4 August 2010 source ↗

Rebecca Lucy Taylor