Fortitude, writes Richard Holloway, is “one of the most important lessons life teaches”, but it can take us a long time to learn. Ageing, he suggests, may be our last chance to master it.

It is a slightly more sober version of Bette Davis’s line about old age not being “a place for sissies”, but also one that affords the 84-year-old broadcaster, writer and former head of the Anglican Church in Scotland plenty of space in his flawless, pitch-perfect prose to explore with unflinching and unsentimental fortitude the taboo of death.

Curiously, since it is the one thing that will happen to every single one of us – however much exercise we take, quinoa we ingest, or mindfulness we embrace – death rarely features among the publicly voiced anxieties of our secular, scientific and sceptical age.

Part of the problem, Holloway believes, is that having discarded the organised, institutional form of religion that used to serve as a framework for society and individuals in which to address death, we have nothing to put in its place. And so we delay considering the inevitability of our demise until the very last minute, when it is often too late to do anything but panic.

What he would prefer us to do is take the arrival of biblical four-score-years-and-ten as a prompt for the sort of self-examination of our place in the bigger scheme of things that used to characterise the medieval discipline of memento mori – “remember that you will die”. However much we resist the thought, there are things we can learn from the past.

Waiting for the Last Bus, though, is far too subtle a book to be an alternative manifesto. Much better to regard it instead as a different way of looking at things, and a hugely nourishing one at that. Because Holloway’s attachment to the rigid formulas of religious faith has loosened in the years since his retirement – he refers to himself as a “doubting priest” – he is the perfect inclusive guide to death.

The free-flowing structure he adopts as he goes about his task is elegant, elegiac and thought-provoking; questions not answers, interspersed with material from a range of writers – WH Auden, Philip Larkin, C Day-Lewis, Edward St Aubyn and Atul Gawande.

Although this isn’t a self-help book, full of top tips for a better death, Holloway does offer the occasional pointer: try thinking about death, he proposes, with an old friend over a bottle of wine. Or why not read obituaries, which he claims “work like those meetings of substance abusers who help each other overcome their addictions by owning and sharing them”. And even if you long ago rejected any link with religion, Holloway recommends giving choral evensong in your local cathedral a try. The place is, he notes, big enough for you to “avoid recruiters out to press-gang your mind”, while the service is sufficiently intimate “to experience the music and touch the longing it carries for the human soul”.

What Waiting for the Last Bus pointedly does not do is offer an invitation to weep, which too often gets in the way of our efforts to think about our own death. And it is therefore Holloway’s triumph that – soppy as I am – I summoned up sufficient fortitude to remain dry-eyed until the very last paragraph of the very last page. There he mentions, in passing, that his dog, who walked the Pentland Hills with him for 17 years, died in the midst of the writing of the book.

“Given how old I am,” he concludes, “she will not be replaced. Daisy was my last dog. And the years blow away like leaves in the wind.”

Peter Stanford’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Faith is published by Hodder

• Waiting for the Last Bus: Reflections on Life and Death is published by Canongate (£14.99). To order a copy for £12.74 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99