Tisdale - Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them).

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Touchstone

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Copyright 2018 by Sallie Tisdale

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Touchstone Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Touchstone hardcover edition June 2018

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Interior design by Jill Putorti

Jacket design by Alex Merto

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Tisdale, Sallie, author.

Title: Advice for future corpses (and those who love them) : a practical perspective on death and dying / Sallie Tisdale.

Description: New York : Touchstone, 2018.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017059645| ISBN 9781501182174 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501182181 (trade paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Death. | Terminal care.

Classification: LCC HQ1073 .T57 2018 | DDC 306.9dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017059645

ISBN 978-1-5011-8217-4

ISBN 978-1-5011-8219-8 (ebook)

For Carol, who taught me to be weightless; Kyogen, who reminded me that it might come as a surprise; Stephanie, who never quit; Marc, who kept laughing; Butch, who found his way to the sunshine; and Mom, who was a good woman.

That was the best ice cream soda I ever tasted.

LAST WORDS OF LOU COSTELLO

R ight now: imagine dying. Make it what you want. You could be in your bedroom, on a lonesome hill, or in a beautiful hotel. Whatever you want. What is the season? What time of day is it? Perhaps you want to lie in sweet summer grass and watch the sun rise over the ocean. Imagine that. Perhaps you want to be cuddled in a soft bed, listening to Mozartor Beyonc. Do you want to be alone? Is there a particular hand you want to hold? Do you smell the faint scent of baking breador Chanel No. 19? Close your eyes. Feel the grass. The silk sheets. The skin of the loving hand. Hear the long-held note. Dance a little. Smell the bread. Imagine that.

* * *

I have never died, so this entire book is a fools advice. Birth and death are the only human acts we cannot practice. We love our murder mysteries, and how we love our video games, but death looms ahead as a kind of theory. In Victorian times, children were kept away from anything regarding sex or birth, but they sat at deathbeds, witnessed deaths, and helped with the care of the body. Now children may watch the birth of a sibling and never see a dead body. But neither do most adults; many people reach the end of their own lives having never seen a dying person.

One day when I was seven, my mother sat at the dining table and cried all afternoon, even though it was almost Christmas. My father told me that my grandfather had died. I wasnt sure what that meant. I liked Grandpa, who laughed a lot and took his dentures out at the dinner table to make the kids scream. My mother started packing a suitcase. She was going to the funeral, he said. I didnt know that word, but if my mother was going out of town alone, it had to be something special. Can I go, too? I asked. No, he said, sharply. I was not allowed. Funerals were not for children. No one explained, and I never saw Grandpa again.

As an adult, Ive tried to see death as clearly as I can. This was less a deliberate choice than the natural path my life took. Perhaps the long-ago echoing mystery of my grandfathers disappearance had something to do with it. Several paths have woven around each other to form my life, and, seen as a braidas a whole life, and not piecesI see the similarities, the shared focus. As a writer, I have to be willing to investigate myself and the world without flinching. As a nurse and an end-of-life educator, I must be willing to step inside the personal world of others, to step inside secrets, hold anothers pain. Im a Buddhist practitioner and teacher, and lead workshops about preparing for death from a Buddhist perspective. This practice requires a ruthless self-examination and a deep study of how I create my world. Together, these strands have given me a measure of equanimity about the inevitable sea of change that is a human life. They have fed each other and taught me to tolerate ambiguity, discomfort of many kinds, and intimacywhich is sometimes the most uncomfortable thing of all. In thinking about death in all its ramifications, these lessons are a great help, and death is a help in deepening all these lessons. I know what to do at the bedside of a dying person, and I know a lot of practical information about what works when we are preparing to die or to lose someone we love. The most important experience Ive had is one most of us share: the deaths of people I love. I know grief.

I can depend on these varied skills to meet a new situation the way an electrician can read wiring in a house hes entering for the first time. But even though death is not unfamiliar to me, I dont want to sound as though dying and death are ordinary. What all these things have taught me is that dying and death will always be extraordinary.

When he was dying, the contemporary Buddhist teacher Dainin Katagiri wrote a remarkable and dense book called Returning to Silence . Life, he wrote, is a dangerous situation. It is the frailty of life that makes it precious; his words are suffused with the blunt fact of his own life passing away. The china bowl is beautiful because sooner or later it will break.... The life of the bowl is always existing in a dangerous situation. Such is our struggle: this precarious beauty. This inevitable wound. We forgethow easily we forgetthat love and loss are intimate companions, that we love the real flower so much more than the plastic one, love the evanescence of autumns brilliant colors, the cast of twilight across a mountainside lasting only a moment. It is this very fragility that opens our hearts.