‘What matters is not how, but when...’

MANILA, Philippines - As a long-time subscriber to Vanity Fair, I always turn first to Proust Questionnaire on the last page before I go back to the other columns and then to the comprehensive articles. The Questionnaire asks the featured celebrities the same set of questions and their answers bare themselves perhaps more than they ever expect, giving you an insight what kind of mortals they really are.

One of the questions is: How would you like to die?

In observance of All Saints/Souls Day, I thought some of the celebs’ answers would provide us intimations of our own mortality.

Here they are:

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

• Daniel Radcliffe (of Harry Potter fame): In a blaze of glory.

• Bone Burnett (music producer who has worked with, among other A-List artists, Elton John): 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 future to have loved. Maybe Ralph Stanley in singing Angel Band.

• John Cheese (an author who acted opposite James Bond and Harry Potter): On my 250th birthday.

• Catherine O’Hara (Canadian actress); Laughing, surrounded by my old grandchildren, who are telling me, “Let go, already, Grandma!”

• Seth Meyers (talk-show host, former Saturday Night Live writer): Old, but with enough remaining strength to bravely sacrifice myself to stop the alien invasion.

• Stephen King (horror novelist): Pleasantly, in the year 2100.

• Jerry Lewis: I didn’t know we had a choice.

• Mary Tyler Moore: Without knowing it.

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

• Willem Dafoe: How doesn’t matter — it’s when that matters. When I’m ready!

• Mindy Kaling (The Office, The Mindy Project; author of the book Why Not Me?): Murdered at my most beautiful.