How would you like to die?

I remember what George said and vowed that rather than let Alzheimer's take me, I would take it. I would live my life as ever to the full and die, before the disease mounted its last attack, in my own home, in a chair on the lawn, with a brandy in my hand to wash down whatever modern version of the "Brompton cocktail" some helpful medic could supply. And with Thomas Tallis on my iPod, I would shake hands with Death.

And even if my voice goes before I do, I shall continue to write polemics against religious delusions, at least until it’s hello darkness my old friend. In which case, why not cancer of the brain? As a terrified, half-aware imbecile, I might even scream for a priest at the close of business, though I hereby state while I am still lucid that the entity thus humiliating itself would not in fact be “me.” (Bear this in mind, in case of any later rumors or fabrications.)

Peacefully, in good physical health, sound of mind, still active, at a great age, with my children around me.

Swiftly, painlessly, and old.

Singing onstage—and everyone walking around me saying, “Look how happy she looks.”

I would like to die in good health, at an old age, in a house on a mountain that looks out over the ocean, dreaming about everyone and everything I have had the impossible good fortune to have loved. Maybe Ralph Stanley is singing “Angel Band.”

Like? I have no soft spot, fondness, admiration, respect, attraction, or esteem for death. I am not taken with it or infatuated by it. I carry no torch, have no crush, take no shine to the word or action of death. I don’t have the hots for it, and I don’t dig it, either.

One thing I state as soon as we’re out of the door: ‘Under no circumstances is anyone to say that I lost a battle with cancer. Or that I bore it bravely. I am not fighting, losing, winning or bearing.’ I will not personify the cancer cells inside me in any form. I reject all metaphors of attack or enmity in the midst, and will have nothing whatever to do with any notion of desert, punishment, fairness or unfairness, or any kind of moral causality.

I need a long and lingering death to make sure that I have time to have a deathbed conversion.

As far as I can tell, I’ll either succumb to some opportunistic infection, for which I’ve refused antibiotics in advance, or, having similarly declined forced feeding, I’ll starve to death. ... I don’t know how long it takes to die of starvation, or whether it hurts, but I dread it, just as I dread my sons watching me go like that. Because that is what they will remember, their mother reduced to a bag of bones.

I’d like to die anytime after the age of 90—in my sleep!

I don’t care as long as Jeffrey and I go together and we end up in a big suite with a view of the ocean.

Surrounded by my great-great-grandchildren.

Quickly, without warning, maybe even in my sleep, and while we're putting in requests: before I lose my mind and my ability to gallop across the countryside on horseback.

Showing off onstage, with everyone laughing and applauding.

Read incorrectly, that sounds like a threat. No thanks, Vanity Fair !

Like Joel McCrea’s character at the end of the movie Ride the High Country. (He says something about “entering his house justified,” sits up to take a last look at the scenery, then rolls contentedly out of the frame.) Or like Bill Nighy’s character at the end of our film Living.