I have read many articles by Atul Gawande over the years. He once wrote an article in The New Yorker about “best medical practices” and standardized medical treatment by explaining how the Cheesecake Factory manages to get the same quality meals at many, many restaurants. Not a bad analogy. Clearly when a physician has access to something that is wonderful for patients, we (and they) want those protocols followed. In his most recent book, “Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End,” Dr. Gawande writes about something for which there are few best practices (although some are emerging through hospice and The Conversation Project): how do people deal with aging and dying? This is a profound and beautiful book, and a pleasure to read and reread.

We hold some ideas as sacred; clarity and honesty are among them. But clarity and honesty are not enough because the clear and honest truth is brutal when it comes to death. There is no escape, no pretending, nothing but the finality of death. I once read (and reread) “Denial of Death” by Ernst Becker, and for a while it was my favorite book ever. Gawande’s book is better; not because Gawande has something to say about death, but because he deals with what it means to lose a loved one. Though Gawande could have written about a religious moment with an after-life or about “non-existence,” which is how Becker refers to death, Gawande’s book is silent on all matters regarding what comes after death, if anything. “Being Mortal” is more important than that question because it’s about a way to experience death and not about religion. The tenderness in the book is palpable—Gawande’s father is going to die—and the relationship between these two wonderful men is what we all seek with our parents, spouses, children, and friends.

“Being Mortal” is about the rawness of the loss that is coming and, at the same time, about the joy of deeply knowing people whom we love. But this is not a book that skirts the question of finality. Like he does in everything he writes, Gawande looks at life and death clearly, and helps us be better than we might have been.