The question
What worries you about getting older?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
A newer fixed question in The Guardian's rotating Q&A pool.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Losing my mind.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 24 February 2024 source ↗
Losing the people that I love.
I was looking at ageing in action, in black-and-white MRI pixels, death and dissolution foretold, and already partly achieved. My 70-year-old brain was shrunken and withered, a worn and sad version of what it once must have been. There were also ominous white spots in the white matter, signs of ischaemic damage, small-vessel disease, known in the trade as white matter hyperintensities – there are various names for them. They looked like some evil pox. Not to put too fine a point on it, my brain is starting to rot. I am starting to rot. It is the writing on the wall, a deadline.
The fact that I smoke.
Being alone and other people getting busier with families and life.
I was doing The Seagull with Carey Mulligan and Kristin Scott Thomas on Broadway. I walked out on stage and looked at Carey and said: “I’ve no idea what to say.” It was pretty deep into the run and it took me by surprise.
Not finishing things.
To tell the truth.
Nurturing, musical, uncompromising.
The Middle East crisis.
Every woman I dated before I met my wife, because I think I convinced too many people that they were the one, and they were not the one.
Esther Rantzen, Mark Steel, Kate Humble, Jon Sopel, Nuala McGovern, Maurice Sendak
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