Advice for Future Corpses (And Those Who Love Them) Quotes

“What I don't think they realize is that when they pray for a healing, death is a healing... It's not the healing that you might want, but as sure as we're born, we're going to die. And we're healed from the troubles of this world.”
― Sallie Tisdale, Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them): A practical perspective on death and dying

“Epicurus thought the fundamental source of human anguish is the fear of death. He developed thought experiments to illustrate that the fear of annihilation is illogical: if you’re extinguished, you can’t regret extinction. There’s nothing to fear about nothing. In nothingness, there is no perception, no consciousness, no memory. “That most fearful of all bad things, death, is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death is present, we are not.” (Many centuries later, Bernard de Fontenelle echoed him. He was a month short of a hundred years old when he died, saying, “I feel nothing except a certain difficulty in continuing to exist.”)”
― Sallie Tisdale, Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them): A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying

“death is present, we are not.” (Many centuries later, Bernard de Fontenelle echoed him. He was a month short of a hundred years old when he died, saying, “I feel nothing except a certain difficulty in continuing to exist.”) Epicurus died at the age of seventy-two from prostatitis, which he found a misery. His attempt at comforting words fails to comfort many people. The idea that there will come a time when I am not is exactly what we fear. The Internet is a handy place to express and fuel our fears; there are many forums available”
― Sallie Tisdale, Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them): A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying

“and the strange, undeniable fact that the presence of death can be joyful.”
― Sallie Tisdale, Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them): A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying

“Poor Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: so misunderstood. She is widely credited with identifying the five stages of grief. She didn’t. Kübler-Ross worked with dying people, not grieving people. She identified clear phases people go through when they are dying not as stages but as emotional experiences that come and go and may overlap.”
― Sallie Tisdale, Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them): A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying

“forgot that I would get old and lose the power that seemed entirely part of me, the power that allowed me to be busy and productive, rear three children, write books in the evening, and still get up and go to work.”
― Sallie Tisdale, Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them): A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying

“True self-determination—as refugees and prisoners show us every day—is the freedom to hold one’s own ideas, to live, however confined, in a spacious mind.”
― Sallie Tisdale, Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them): A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying

“Our ideals about a so-called good death are constricting. Death is not something at which we succeed or fail, something to achieve. Life and death are not possessions.”
― Sallie Tisdale, Advice for Future Corpses (And Those Who Love Them): A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying

“…grief is not a disease to be cured. Grief is a wound, not unlike that from a knife or a bludgeon. The injury will heal in time leaving a scar but the tissue is never quite the same. One moves forward changed.”
― Sallie Tisdale, Advice for Future Corpses (And Those Who Love Them): A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying

“Acceptance is found only by wholly inhabiting our denial. Contemplating death is really contemplating resistance, and for a long time. How do we get ready to die? We start with not being ready. We start with the fact that we are afraid. A long, lonesome examination of our fear. We start by admitting that we are all future corpses pretending we don’t know.”
― Sallie Tisdale, Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them): A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying

“But why would we mistake an abundance of information for peace of mind?”
― Sallie Tisdale, Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them): A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying

“The psychoanalyst Otto Rank paired “life anxiety” and “death anxiety.” He called the first that of realizing one’s self as an individual, one who is vulnerable, lonely, separate. The latter is the realization that the only way to overcome our loneliness is to merge with others and lose our precious individuality. We are left afraid of both life and death. In 1973, Ernest Becker, a cultural anthropologist, built on the ideas of Rank and others in an influential book called The Denial of Death. He believed that the “fear-of-death layer” is innermost in the human psyche, “the layer of our true and basic animal anxieties, the terror that we carry around in our secret heart.” The human, he wrote, “is a worm and food for worms . . . a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with.”
― Sallie Tisdale, Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them): A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying

“We share a grand social agreement about mortality. We choose not to notice, if we can.”
― Sallie Tisdale, Advice for Future Corpses (And Those Who Love Them): A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying

“Larry Hjort, an AIDS activist, gave counsel to people who were overwhelmed with the needs of their dying friends. “Everyone is perfectly adequate,” he said. “There are just some impossible situations.”
― Sallie Tisdale, Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them): A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying

“Life, he wrote, “is a dangerous situation.” It is the frailty of life that makes it precious;”
― Sallie Tisdale, Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them): A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying

“When I thought about death in those years, I didn’t quite believe in it.”
― Sallie Tisdale, Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them): A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying