When Tiago Rodrigues' father was in hospital in the last weeks of his life, he was regularly visited by Teresa, a volunteer who spent time talking to patients, helping to combat the loneliness of the disease. During Tiago's visits, his father would tell him about his meetings with Teresa and, one day, he asked her to bring him a notebook and pen so that he could write a book about his experiences in hospital. It even had a title: No Yogurt for the Dead. Tiago's father had always hated yogurt, but had started to like it once it became part of his daily diet.
daily diet. After his father's death, Tiago opened the notebook to see what he had written in it, but there were only a few lines and smudges. His father's hand must have been too weak - they were just scribbles. Later, Teresa told Tiago that his father talked about the book all the time, wanting to combine the experience of being in hospital with memories of his life, particularly his work as a journalist. It was then that Tiago Rodrigues decided to write No Yogurt for the Dead, about a volunteer who hears the stories of a man about to die and about the book he never got around to writing.