How would you like to die?

Does it make a difference? You’re dead.

In my sleep. And I don’t think about it. It’ll be what it’ll be.

Coming offstage after a five-minute standing ovation, falling into the arms of my lover, and having the doctor look at me and say, “This is impossible! She looks much too young to go!”

That process depends on what you are dying of. The body can fail in ways that are extremely distressing, slowly and painfully, demanding much stoicism, or it can switch off with little more than a flash of dizziness. In my family we seem to have been uncommonly lucky in that respect. There was the 82-year-old uncle who was at a meet of the Norwich Stag Hounds, enjoying a drink with friends, when crash! And he fell off his horse, dead. There was the cousin in her eighties who fell dead as she was filling a kettle to make tea, and the other cousin, 98, who slipped away so gently that the sister who was holding her hand didn’t realise that she had stopped breathing.

It was this celestial splendor that suddenly made me realize how little time, how little life, I had left. My sense of the heavens’ beauty, of eternity, was inseparably mixed for me with a sense of transience — and death. ... I told my friends Kate and Allen, “I would like to see such a sky again when I am dying.” “We’ll wheel you outside,” they said.

When I’m extremely old during a huge family celebration where everyone is playing games and giving pre-written toasts … to me.

If needed—a doctor-assisted death.

In my sleep. In bed. With a half-eaten egg salad sandwich on my chest.

I don't want to die. I don't think I'm going to die…but we all have to die. Since I do, I hope I live on in the hearts and minds of people.

Like John Huston, after shooting The Dead.

Sometimes when I’m on a plane, as I often am, the weather is rough and we’re worried about going down. I think: If I hold the hand of the person next to me, I’ll be holding everyone’s hand. Like my dear friend, the late Wilma Mankiller, principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, I want to know: I’m going to the other side of the mountain.

Peacefully, knowing I’ll be composted in a mushroom suit.

With a malicious grin that implies I know something you don’t.

In my sleep, “dreaming android dreams of electric sheep.”

In my sleep in my 90s, after a great gig.

Sufficiently well to see Johnson and Truss and then two or three days later, she’s dead. I thought, that’s fantastic. That’s something to celebrate. That’s a great death.

When I am ready. When I have had enough. When I can no longer give anything. When I can no longer appreciate the small beauties. Without pain or remorse.

Really? Okay, if I have enough time I might go to Switzerland and drink the drink. I believe in euthanasia. What we do for our beloved pets, we should be able to do for our beloved humans or ourselves.