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Staff Pick
Years of experience as a palliative care nurse and a Buddhist practitioner have given Sallie Tisdale a unique perspective on death and dying. Redolent with sound advice and wise counsel for both the living and the dying. Recommended By Mary Jo S., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
A straightforward, wise, and humorous narrative field guide for both the dying and those who love them by an author who brings a unique set of qualifications to this delicate subject — she's a Pushcart Prize-winning writer, a palliative care nurse with more than ten years of experience, and a lifelong Buddhist.
If you don't plan, you're only limiting your options.
We do not know when we will die. We may see it coming from far away, or all at once. But I will die and you will die. You believe that, don't you?
You get ready to die the way you get ready for a trip. Start by realizing you don't know the way. Read a few travel guides. Study the language, look at maps, gather equipment. Let yourself imagine what it will be like. Pack your bags. This book is one of those travel guides — a guide to preparing for your own death and the deaths of people close to you.
The fact of death is hard to believe. Sallie Tisdale explores our fears and all the ways death and talking about death make us uncomfortable — but she also explores its intimacies and joys. Tisdale looks at grief, what the last days and hours of life are like, and what happens to dead bodies. Advice for Future Corpses includes exercises designed to make you think differently about the inevitable. She includes practical advice, personal experience, a little Buddhist philosophy, and stories.
But this isn't a book of inspiration or spiritual advice — Advice for Future Corpses is about how you can get ready. Start by admitting that we are all future corpses.
Review
"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
About the Author
Sallie Tisdale is the author of Talk Dirty to Me, Stepping Westward, and Women of the Way. She has received a Pushcart Prize, an NEA Fellowship, the James Phelan Literary Award, and was a Dorothy and Arthur Shoenfeldt Distinguished Writer of the year. Her work has appeared in Harper's, The New Yorker, Threepenny Review, Antioch Review, Conjunctions, and Tricycle. Tisdale is a long-time member of PEN and was a judge for the National Book Award in 2010.