This is a book about aging, fatal illness, death - that is, about things that we are so afraid of that we try not to think about them at all, to push them to the periphery of consciousness. The author of the book, the famous American surgeon Atul Gawande, is sure that hiding one’s head in the sand is wrong: death is a part of life, its natural end, and it is in this capacity, consciously and calmly, that one should accept it. The trouble is that old age and dying in modern culture are handled by medicine, which considers death simply a procedural failure, a fatal technical failure. Without trying to understand what is really important and valuable for a person in the last months, weeks and days of his life, we heroically “fight to the last”, testing all new methods of treatment on a terminal patient - as painful as they are useless. How to change this situation? How to find the right words for loved ones whose lives are coming to an end? How to learn to relate to death correctly?