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Sallie Tisdale
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Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them): A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying Hardcover – June 12, 2018

by Sallie Tisdale (Author)
4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 545 ratings
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A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK CRITICS’ TOP 10 BOOK OF THE YEAR

“In its loving, fierce specificity, this book on how to die is also a blessedly saccharine-free guide for how to live.” —The New York Times

We Are All Future Corpses

Former NEA fellow and Pushcart Prize-winning writer Sallie Tisdale offers a lyrical, thought-provoking, yet practical perspective on death and dying in Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them). Informed by her many years working as a nurse, with more than a decade in palliative care, Tisdale provides a frank, direct, and compassionate meditation on the inevitable.

From the sublime (the faint sound of Mozart as you take your last breath) to the ridiculous (lessons on how to close the sagging jaw of a corpse), Tisdale leads the reader through the peaks and troughs of death with a calm, wise, and humorous hand. Advice for Future Corpses is more than a how-to manual or a spiritual bible: it is a graceful compilation of honest and intimate anecdotes based on the deaths Tisdale has witnessed in her work and life, as well as stories from cultures, traditions, and literature around the world.

Tisdale explores all the heartbreaking, beautiful, terrifying, confusing, absurd, and even joyful experiences that accompany the work of dying, including:

A Good Death: What does it mean to die “a good death”? Can there be more than one kind of good death? What can I do to make my death, or the deaths of my loved ones, good?

Communication: What to say and not to say, what to ask, and when, from the dying, loved ones, doctors, and more.

Last Months, Weeks, Days, and Hours: What you might expect, physically and emotionally, including the limitations, freedoms, pain, and joy of this unique time.

Bodies: What happens to a body after death? What options are available to me after my death, and how do I choose—and make sure my wishes are followed?

Grief: “Grief is the story that must be told over and over...Grief is the breath after the last one.”

Beautifully written and compulsively readable, Advice for Future Corpses offers the resources and reassurance that we all need for planning the ends of our lives, and is essential reading for future corpses everywhere.
Previous page
  1. Print length
    256 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Gallery Books
  4. Publication date
    June 12, 2018
  5. Dimensions
    5.75 x 0.75 x 8.75 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    150118217X
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1501182174
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“In its loving, fierce specificity, this book on how to die is also a blessedly saccharine-free guide for how to live. . . . Tisdale does not write to allay anxieties but to acknowledge them, and she brings death so close, in such detail and with such directness, that something unusual happens, something that feels a bit taboo. She invites not just awe or dread—but our curiosity. And why not? We are, after all, just 'future corpses pretending we don’t know.'”
—New York Times

“Tisdale (Violation: Collected Essays), a former nurse, offers an intimate insider’s look at dying, aimed at both caregivers and mortally ill people. By turns philosophical and pragmatic, Tisdale gently prods readers to make plans while they can … Tisdale’s forthright narrative voice, charmingly bossy in style (“Be very careful about odors.... You don’t want to be the most nauseating thing that happens in the day”), is so generous and kind in spirit that readers will gladly follow along.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Sallie Tisdale’s elegantly understated new book pretends to be a user’s guide when in fact it’s a profound meditation. It also pretends to be about how to die. Actually, it’s about how to live.”
—David Shields, bestselling author of Reality Hunger

"Reading the book is like having a nice, long chat with an unsqueamish friend. . . Tisdale writes warmly, sharing what she knows with a natural gift."
—Portland Tribune

“A very good book on making peace with the inevitable and has been great in conjunction as an EMT both here in the states and Port au Prince, Haiti, where untimely death is a daily occurrence much like this crisis.”
—CNN

“When a title sets the tone for a book, readers can see themselves invited into a conversation with kindness. . . [Advice for Future Corpses] is written in a gentle tone, but without euphemisms, as you would hope to hear from the person who sits beside to tell you that you are going to die. Someday.”
—popmatters.com

“[Tisdale] could not be more earnest and authentic in adopting a compassionate understanding of death and dying. . . This book is packed with a great wealth of information.”
—Choice Connect

Praise for Sallie Tisdale

"The work of caring for others is at the center of Tisdale’s writing, and it proves an endlessly complex and engaging subject."
— Laura Marsh, The New Yorker

"Sallie Tisdale is the real thing, a writer who thinks like a philosopher, observes like a journalist, and sings on the page like a poet"
—Meghan Daum, author of The Unspeakable

"I read Sallie Tisdale and within a few seconds I am under her spell. It matters not whether she's writing about the tyranny of weight loss, the startling lives of blowflies, or what it's like to work in an oncology ward (she is a dedicated nurse as well as a brilliant writer), I'm all in, all the time. I will go anywhere she wants to take me. An alternate image—climbing into a submarine with Tisdale at the controls and diving down down down, into her singular sensibility, her genius for language,her love of our deeply imperfect world."
—Karen Karbo, author of Julia Child Rules: Lessons on Savoring Life

About the Author

Sallie Tisdale is the author of several books, including Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love them), Violation, Talk Dirty to Me, Stepping Westward, and Women of the Way. She has received a Pushcart Prize, an NEA Fellowship, the James D. Phelan Literary Award, and was selected for the Shoenfeldt Distinguished Visiting Writer Series. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Threepenny Review, The Antioch Review, Conjunctions, and Tricycle. In addition to her award-winning writing career, Tisdale has been a nurse for many years, including a decade in palliative care. She lives in Portland, Oregon. Visit her online at SallieTisdale.com.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Gallery Books; First Edition, First Printing (June 12, 2018)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 150118217X
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1501182174
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.2 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.75 x 0.75 x 8.75 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 545 ratings

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Sallie Tisdale

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Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5 stars
4.6 out of 5
545 global ratings
Well written. Easy to read.
5 Stars
Well written. Easy to read.
This is best book I've read on dying. There is no need to fear. We all have to do it. Good advice on being a spectator.
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Top reviews from the United States

Jane
5.0 out of 5 stars Wow!
Reviewed in the United States on December 14, 2023
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I wasn't expecting this to be this good! i have read so many books on this topic and here i learned a lot of what no one else talks about. So many of my relatives have turbo cancer and i was lost. This is so helpful.
2 people found this helpful
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C. Gross
5.0 out of 5 stars super interesting and a great read.
Reviewed in the United States on August 23, 2023
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my dad died and all I got was this book
6 people found this helpful
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Hande Z
4.0 out of 5 stars Have no fear
Reviewed in the United States on May 9, 2019
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Let’s talk about death; let’s talk it to death. That is the underlying purpose of this book, and the author Sallie Tisdale, has done a remarkable job transforming a much-shunned subject into a likeable inquiry so much so that half-way through the book the reader might start to rue the book approaching to the end.

ST is a Zen Buddhist but she is not spreading the tenets of Buddhism, only those aspects that help her come to face death and ponder about it with equanimity and stare at it with dignity. It is true, she says, that everything about this book is theory for she has not yet died.

Tracing humanity’s experience and fear of death, and the ubiquitous death rituals in every culture, ST explains why death transfixes us so. From the point of view of the dying, these are all efforts in futility. The person about to die has no concern (or shouldn’t have) for what happens to hi for the ‘him’ in him is gone. He leaves behind a corpse where ‘he’ once lived. Even monuments of remembrance are forgotten after three or four generations. ST recalls the oft-quoted wisdom of Epicurus, exhorting us not to fear death – ‘for where death is, we are not, where we are, death is not’.

Death is a fact that we all have to face and we can hardly have a say in it. ST says, ‘We can plan for many elements of dying. We can write a will, decide what music we want to hear and how to dispose of our bodies. But even if I choose assistance in dying and drink the medication with my own hands, I haven’t chosen to die. Death is choosing me.’ She warns against the hubris in many escapist theories – including one that goes by the name of ‘terror management theory’.

Another helpful segment of the book deals with the idea of the ‘good death’. Here she manages our expectations very well. ‘We are animals, our bodies fail, and we cannot stop dying.’ Death is an event, but dying goes on a bit longer, and in the chapter, ‘Last Months’, ST discusses the state of dying towards the end. ‘Dying is psychological work, emotional work, spiritual work. The simplest things take time; everything once taken for granted changes, and a person either gets sad or gets mad or settles into a new kind of peace.’

ST discusses hospice care and people at death’s door. There is a lot to know about hospices and the kind of care required and expected. Not everyone who is faced with the choice of sending a dying relative to a hospice or to be kept at home know what the patient (the dying) needs. ST then brings us to the point specifically – all too often our loved one is dying and we want him to live. ST reminds us that it is not about what we want. It is what the dying wants and needs.

We may have to change the current terminology to change our attitudes. We are not ‘pulling the plug’ when we take a dying person off life support. We are releasing him from ‘excessive technology and invasive treatments. When we allow death to happen, we are not killing people, we are caring for them. We are loving them’. The opposite is nothing but foolish, selfish acts to satisfy our needs rather than that of the dying person, and it invariably proves not only futile, but prolongs the suffering of the patient.

The appendices are useful. The first is ‘Preparing a Death Plan’, helping us plan ahead in the event of a quick and sudden death. The second deals with ‘Advance Directives. The third deals with organ donations. The fourth with assisted death. Give them some urgent and thorough consideration.
16 people found this helpful
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Carol E. Smaldino
5.0 out of 5 stars Not always comfortable but terribly necessary, with wit and compassion
Reviewed in the United States on February 14, 2019
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I heard about this book from someone who works in palliative care. I am a psychotherapist but have always been on the phobic side when it comes to death and dying, particularly my own. Sallie Tisdale is brilliant in her decision to go through different aspecta for the dying human being as well as for the witnesses or companions. There is nothing trite about this book, no set steps and if anything, Tisdale winds up joining us in all the possibilities--in authentic fear and longing, in messiness and even humor. She joins us or she kind of welcomes the reader to join her there. Amazingly to me, Tisdale is a Buddhist who never claims any immunity from her own moods and unrealistic wishes; she is a witness also to her own humanness all the way through. She doesn't make death go away, duh!, but she makes it easier to think and talk about. This is not a book to read only once and it makes the most enlightened of us (or so we thought) reconsider our own burial plans as well. Yes, not convenient, but excellent and I think, necessary.
11 people found this helpful
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nanoNYC
5.0 out of 5 stars Great advice for yourself or those you love.
Reviewed in the United States on April 15, 2024
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When I became my mother's caregiver I read many books about dying and dementia, but this book was far and away the best.
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T. Rose
5.0 out of 5 stars The Right Book For This Season Of My Life
Reviewed in the United States on February 23, 2021
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I am no stranger to loss and grief. At my age, 65, I am seeing more and more of my friends and relatives passing before me. I became concerned about future plans regarding life and death. While this book's title initially turned me off considering this a a possible read, upon acquiring it and reading the digital version, I knew it was a valuable resource for me. I have ordered the hardcover for my home library and will recommend it to anyone my age. This book gave me an understanding of the natural and unnatural processes of life and death. I am a logical thinking person and the author has provided so many truths I can relate to having experienced the death of my father in an aircraft explosion when I was six years old. She answered most of my questions about death, dying and grief. I, too, worked n nursing homes where I was present at death beds and cared for those residents. I am ready to set forth and meet the future armed with the knowledge gained through reading this book. Much appreciation!
7 people found this helpful
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Keeper of Books
5.0 out of 5 stars Honest and Compassionate
Reviewed in the United States on June 26, 2021
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This book gave me incredible, accurate, and valuable insight to all aspects of the process of dying at a time I really needed it. My uncle was passing away and I was headed out to visit him before he left. He had just been diagnosed with pancreatic and brain cancers and given 2 to 4 weeks to live. About the time of his diagnosis I "happened" upon this book. I read furiously, gaining as much knowledge as possible before my visit with him. Everything I saw and experienced there was explained in this book and it gave me such a clearer picture of what was happening. It took fear out of the equation. I am so grateful.
4 people found this helpful
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Kay
3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting
Reviewed in the United States on September 11, 2019
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This book was touted as a book written by a hospice nurse with 30-some years of experience, telling the stories of those in their final days. It was not that... not really at all.. but it wasn’t bad. It was a fragmented, poorly written compilation of her opinion on Buddhism, embalming, death, caregiving during the end stages of life, morbid comments about a dying body, and a few personal stories sprinkled-in with a plethora of facts stolen from other sources. I did learn some interesting and valuable things. There were lots & lots of facts and lots of opinions in this book.... good or bad.
7 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

Daniel Marc Reicher
5.0 out of 5 stars Their reality check on death.
Reviewed in Canada on April 24, 2023
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The author of this book has had lots of experience dealing with dying human beings. She shows how compassionate attention is important during those final moments.
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Becky Sindall
5.0 out of 5 stars Practical and honest
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 1, 2021
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A wonderful read for anyone who will die one day. The contents is practical and warmly written. It should be required reading.
One person found this helpful
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IrsSamsara
5.0 out of 5 stars A thoughtful read
Reviewed in Canada on December 17, 2018
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I recently lost my spouse to cancer. I was her primary caregiver and was alongside her through the dying process at a hospice facility. I read a lot of books on death and dying to prepare myself While there are parts of the book that seem to be the author’s exploratory thinking, there are none better when describing the process of dying and how to behave and the grief afterwards. None. Her description of grief is i tense and poetic and spot on. Her discussion of the dying process illuminates. This book is a must read for those chapters alone
5 people found this helpful
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Debra Lakin
5.0 out of 5 stars Good read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 20, 2019
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As expected
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Leeann Abruzzi
5.0 out of 5 stars Very useful information
Reviewed in Canada on August 15, 2018
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This is a really useful guide that answers all your questions about death and dying. Wonderful guide for the care provider.
2 people found this helpful
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