Advice for Future Corpses (And Those Who Love Them)

A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying

Sallie Tisdale

This book is a collection of advice for the dying and the people who take care of them. With practical guidance and plenty of compassion, it unflinchingly looks death straight in the face.

Sallie Tisdale is an award-winning author. She’s won the Pushcart prize and an NEA Fellowship. She’s written for The New Yorker and Harper’s. She can absolutely write a sentence, tell a story, and deliver a great quote at the right time. She’s also been a palliative care nurse for more than a decade.

She brings both sets of skills to bear in this thorough examination of death — from months ahead of the event, through the actual death itself, through grief and ceremony, and on to life without. Reading this is like going on a trip to somewhere unknown with a friend who’s been there before.

It can get a bit heavy — how could it not? But it’s mostly practical and includes a recognition of the entire emotional spectrum that comes with confronting mortality. She demystifies what to expect as death nears: what to plan, how to talk with the dying, and options for handling the body after death. She includes a death planner in the appendix, and she encourages documentation of everything from whether you want your body to go to science, to what kind of music you’d like to hear — and who you do and don’t want to see as you’re dying.

Before the practicalities, Tisdale begins with the idea that we must recognize death as an inevitable part of life — and that the recognition itself can improve our lives. She explores the way, at least in the US, we make death weird for children and how that sets us all up for a lifetime of being weird about it.

Tisdale’s writing has a refreshing bluntness. She starts the book with the lines, ‘I have never died, so this entire book is a fool’s advice. Birth and death are the only human acts we cannot practice.’

Tisdale tells a good story — or lets other people tell their stories. There are some funny bits with the dark humor you might expect from a palliative care nurse. ‘One of the good physicians with whom I work,’ she writes, ‘keeps a cartoon on her office door. The doctor is talking to the patient, gowned and barefoot, sitting on the exam table: You’ve got six months. But with aggressive treatment, we can help make that seem much longer.’

If you believe that you’re going to die someday — or you know someone else who might — this book will give you insight into that process and help you on your way. It’s the advice of a palliative care nurse wrapped in the words of an award-winning author, a comforting and practical map to our unavoidable fate.

Until the 1930s, most people in the United States died at home. Today about 80 percent of American deaths and almost as many in the United Kingdom take place in hospitals or nursing homes.

We usually have no choice about when we die, so if we can, we try to choose where we die. The rise of hospice services has brought back the idea of dying at home. Here’s that pretty picture again: Grandpa in his own bed, surrounded by loving family. But home is more complicated than you think, and often a mixed blessing at best. — Sallie Tisdale

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