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.
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“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.’”
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New York Times