Advice for Future Corpses by Sallie Tisdale

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 us 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. "Sallie Tisdale's elegantly understated new book pretends to be a user's guide when in fact it's a profound meditation" (David Shields, bestselling author of Reality Hunger).

The Art of Dying Well by Katy Butler

The Art of Dying - written by the New York Times bestselling author of Knocking on Heaven's Door - is a reassuring and thoroughly researched guide to maintaining a high quality of life-from resilient old age to the first inklings of a serious illness to the final breath.

Packed with extraordinarily helpful insights and inspiring true stories, award-winning journalist Katy Butler shows how to thrive in later life, how to get the best from our health system, and how to make your own "good death" more likely. This handbook of step by step preparations - practical, communal, physical, and sometimes spiritual - will help you make the most of your remaining time, be it decades, years, or months.

The Art of Death by Edwidge Danticat

"She wanted something in between, just enough time to put her affairs in order and get a few things off her chest. She got her wish. Not everyone gets theirs."

A moving reflection on a subject that touches us all, by the bestselling author of Claire of the Sea Light

Edwidge Danticat's The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story is at once a personal account of her mother dying from cancer and a deeply considered reckoning with the ways that other writers have approached death in their own work. "Writing has been the primary way I have tried to make sense of my losses," Danticat notes in her introduction. "I have been writing about death for as long as I have been writing." The book moves outward from the shock of her mother's diagnosis and sifts through Danticat's writing life and personal history, all the while shifting fluidly from examples that range from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude to Toni Morrison's Sula. The narrative, which continually circles the many incarnations of death from individual to large-scale catastrophes, culminates in a beautiful, heartrending prayer in the voice of Danticat's mother. A moving tribute and a work of astute criticism, The Art of Death is a book that will profoundly alter all who encounter it.

Bearing the Unbearable by Joanne Cacciatore

When a loved one dies, the pain of loss can feel unbearable-especially in the case of a traumatizing death that leaves us shouting, "NO!" with every fiber of our body. The process of grieving can feel wild and nonlinear-and often lasts for much longer than other people, the nonbereaved, tell us it should.

Organized into fifty-two short chapters, Bearing the Unbearable is a companion for life's most difficult times, revealing how grief can open our hearts to connection, compassion, and the very essence of our shared humanity. Dr. Joanne Cacciatore-bereavement educator, researcher, Zen priest, and leading counselor in the field-accompanies us along the heartbreaking path of love, loss, and grief. Through moving stories of her encounters with grief over decades of supporting individuals, families, and communities-as well as her own experience with loss-Cacciatore opens a space to process, integrate, and deeply honor our grief.

Not just for the bereaved, Bearing the Unbearable will be required reading for grief counselors, therapists and social workers, clergy of all varieties, educators, academics, and medical professionals. Organized into fifty-two accessible and stand-alone chapters, this book is also perfect for being read aloud in support groups.

A Beginner's Guide to the End

The first ever practical, compassionate, and comprehensive guide to dying-and living fully until you do.

"There is nothing wrong with you for dying," palliative care doctor B.J. Miller and Shoshana Berger write in A Beginner's Guide to the End. "Our ultimate purpose here isn't so much to help you die as it is to free up as much life as possible until you do."

Theirs is a clear-eyed and big-hearted action plan for approaching the end of life, written to help readers feel more in control of an experience that so often seems anything but controllable. Their book offers everything from step-by-step instructions for how to do your paperwork and navigate the healthcare system to answers to questions you might be afraid to ask your doctor, like whether or not sex is still okay when you're sick. You'll be walked through how to break the news to your employer, whether to share old secrets with your family, how to face friends who might not be as empathetic as you'd hoped, and to how to talk to your children about your will. (Don't worry: if anyone gets snippy, it'll likely be their spouses, not them.) There are also lessons for survivors, like how to shut down a loved one's social media accounts, clean out the house, and write a great eulogy.

An honest, surprising, and detailed-oriented guide to the most universal of all experiences, A Beginner's Guide to the End is the one book that everyone needs.

The Best Care Possible by Ira Byock, MD

Dr. Ira Byock, a doctor on the front lines of hospital care, illuminates the most important and controversial social issues of our time in The Best Care Possible.

One of the foremost palliative-care physicians in the country, Dr. Ira Byock argues that how we die represents a national crisis. To ensure the best possible elder care, Dr. Byock explains we must not only remake our healthcare system but also move beyond our cultural aversion to thinking about death.

The Best Care Possible is a compelling meditation on medicine and ethics told through page-turning life-or-death medical drama. It has paved the way for a national conversation.