Advice for Future Corpses: A Palliative Nurse on What She's Learned About Last Days

In Advice for Future Corpses, author and palliative care nurse Sallie Tisdale shares insight and contemplation into what constitutes a good death. Managing our own avoidance and fear, she writes, is key to shepherding a peaceful final passage. Here she describes what to expect, and consider, during the last days and hours.

Death takes many forms. One death is anticipated over months. Another death is stunningly abrupt. And now and then death is held back by technology. I have seen how these deaths are different, and they are all the same, in the end: A person breathes and then breathes no more. He enters a stillness like no other. Breath. Another breath, and then no more. But when the breaths are made by a machine or the blood pressure is sustained by powerful drugs, someone has to make an awful decision....Journalist and author Virginia Morris pleads for a change of terms: “When we take a terminally ill patient off life support, we are not ‘pulling the plug,’ we are ‘freeing’ the patient to die. We are ‘releasing’ her from excessive technology and invasive treatments. When we allow death to happen, we are not killing people, we are caring for them. We are loving them....”

A dying person’s attention turns toward a place we do not see and that they cannot explain. They are done with the business of the living, as it were, and more or less finished with us. Now they are not a mother or a plumber or a friend. Now they are entirely a dying person, and the world begins to shine. In spite of going hours without speaking, in spite of needing help to button a shirt, he is busy. He may not have the energy to talk, because he is waiting for something and that takes everything he has left.

He may be waiting to understand why.

Laugh. Laugh! Sing. The last kiss, the last dream, the last joke to tell. I have been telling you all the many things we might say, and shouldn’t. Things to say as the end is coming: I love you. I hope the best for you. We will be all right. Go with peace.