The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty

This memoir by Carolyn G. Heilbrun was written 20 years ago and that was when I read it for the first time. I loved it then and so, when my book group agreed to have a thematic meeting on aging gracefully, I immediately thought of re-reading this book. Strangely enough, it did not resonate with me this time around to the same extent, even though I am now the age she was when she wrote it. Still, it is a lovely book with some great insights, and she is such a good writer that it is a pleasure to read.
The passages that spoke to me were often not about aging per se, but about the world in general, and it is staggering how pertinent to our present times her observations were:
"My sixties covered a period of pronounced meanness in the United States and in the world, meanness arising from a sense of righteousness and the need to punish, preferably with violence, those who do not share one's beliefs. For the first time in my life, I became fearful of institutionalized religion...I became awakened, sadly, to policies determined to transpose the symptoms of our societal failures into its causes: the poor, that is, were to be blamed for the failures of a mean-spirited nation that condemned them to poverty...What might be called political sadness arises...as an indirect response to organized and publicly condoned selfishness and revenge..."
And this on reading:
"True sadness which is not nostalgia can...be dispelled by reading...Lifelong readers continue to read, finding in books...the means to enjoy life or to endure it."
She does indeed talk about aging and quotes (indirectly) from Montaigne on the subject:
"Above all, now that I feel my life to be brief in time, do I seek to extend it in weight. I try to delay the velocity of its flight by the velocity with which I grasp it; and to compensate for the speed of its collapse by the zest which I throw into it. The shorter my hold on life, the deeper and fuller do I seek to rend it. Others feel the sweetness of contentment and well-being; I feel it just as much as they do, but not by letting it just slip away."
She also talks about outliving our time, when there is no further point in continuing. She had given herself permission to commit suicide at the age of 70 but now says, "I find it powerfully reassuring now to think of life as borrowed time. Each day one can say to oneself: I can always die; do I choose death or life? I daily choose life the more earnesly becasue it is a choice."  She goes on to caution against "...indifference's seduction; however often apathy assaults me in these last decades, I know it to be dangerous."
She, like others I have read on the subject, encourages focus on the present, eschewing time spent on memories. "Every time those of us in our last decades allow a memory to occur, we forget to look at what is in front of us." Among other things, she writes chapters on downsizing, her love of all things English, on not wearing dresses, on sadness, on listening to the young(er), on family and husbands, on sex and romance, and on technology. Here is a review from The New York Times, and a collection of quotes from the book in GoodReads. Well worth the read.
Carolyn Gold Heilbrun, born in 1926, was an academic at Columbia University and the first woman to receive tenure there in the English department. She was a prolific author of academic and non-fiction works on topics often related to feminism. Under her pen name, Amanda Cross, she also wrote a series of mysteries with a woman professor as the protagonist. She committed suicide in 2003.  There is a fabulous obituary in the New York Times, and an interview with her in the New York Times Magazine a decade before she died. There is a list of her books and more information about her also in this article from Wikipedia.