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.’”
— New York Times
“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…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, author of Reality HungerBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
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.
Gabra Zackman is an actress, author, and narrator who has won several AudioFile Earphones Awards. She was educated at Northwestern University. A classically trained actress, she has appeared in theaters all over the country as well as on film and television.