Sending: Speak With Dead, but better?

[Millstone85]

My PCs tend to not be familiar with most corpses.

True, but the use case I was imagining was where familiarity has already been established - in the case where one could Send to the creature already while it was alive

I don't follow you. Sending has a cast time of one action and a duration of one round. There's almost no room for "cast while they're still alive and they receive after death."

Yes, I think you misinterpreted the exchange. It is about two different castings of the spell, one while the target was alive and one now that the target is dead, and the assumption that there was enough familiarity for the first casting to work.