•  Active Aging

The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty
By Carolyn G. Heilbrun
Ballantine Books, 1997
225 pp.

As people have observed plenty of times, growing old isn't for sissies.

In her book The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty, author Carolyn G. Heilbrun never pretends that aging is easy. She was at first so worried about her potential deterioration that she decided to end her life at age 70, writing matter-of-factly that she preferred to "leave the party while it's still fun."

It was not a decision made out of despair. For years Heilbrun had ably straddled two worlds, penning the wildly popular Kate Fansler detective series under the name Amanda Cross while balancing a demanding academic career as a literature professor at Columbia University. She had a rich family life, good health, a strong marriage, and the friendship of her adult children. Nonetheless, she was convinced that she stood on the brink of certain decline and could become a feeble burden on those she loved.

Fortunately for us, Heilbrun changed her mind.

By age 70, there is often plenty of fear, frustration, and disillusionment to go around. As Heilbrun notes, fellow author and critic Doris Grumbach confronts age and mortality with a "cry of despair" in her 1991 journal Coming into the End Zone, a memoir about life in her seventieth year. To those whose lives are busy and full, the erosion of their creative powers is a grim prospect.

Heilbrun's own fear, however, turns into amazement, even delight. She discovers an unexpected tide rising in herself as she elects to live each day on borrowed time, an act that opens up a whole new world of possibilities. As she demonstrated in earlier books, Reinventing Womanhood and Writing A Woman's Life, Heilbrun is a model of curiosity and careful thinking. She is also a marvelous storyteller. It is great fun to be swept along with her as she avoids being trapped by the "killing monster" of habit. "These supposedly sedate years [are] the time to discover new choices and act upon them," she says.

One daring choice that surprised Heilbrun herself was her decision to resign from her tenured position at Columbia. For Heilbrun, as for many of us, work is the essence of life. Heilbrun discovers after her resignation she is liberated from a "constant unnoticed stream of anger and resentment" she had felt in response to the university's chauvinism and stifling departmental politics. And although she finds herself relishing retirement, negotiating her new freedom was difficult at first. "For those with too much time and no world, a world must be found," she says, neatly summarizing the crucial challenge of old age. As Heilbrun's detective protagonist, Kate Fansler, once observed, retirement can rob the shape from the day and leave "freedom and time flapping about one."

Judging herself rather strictly, Heilbrun insists that she wasted her first five years of freedom. Although her achievements during that period look impressive -- she wrote a biography of Gloria Steinem, among other things -- she felt little fulfillment until she became attuned to her own deep and abiding passions. Only by meeting her desires head on -- adopting a beloved dog, finding an alternative home, and even choosing to live beyond seventy -- does she provide the catalyst for her own evolution.

Discussing her rejection of out-worn routines in favor of change, she writes, "As E.M. Forster so brilliantly put it, 'It is difficult, after accepting six cups of tea, to throw the seventh in the face of your hostess.' Sometimes the only way to live is to get out, or at least seriously contemplate getting out, doing the impossible, flinging the conventional tea."

Heilbrun spends her gift of time in balanced fashion, enjoying both solitary occupations and a rich new collection of friendships. "Friendship is the key and great gift" of Heilbrun's sixties, and she urges us all to welcome it into our lives. Habitually a bit of a loner, she breaks from her pattern and finds special joy in friendships with younger women. Lucky enough to have renewed old friendships through e-mail, she wishes everyone over 65 had a working computer and Internet access. Such connections provide a new community of the like-minded and an escape from routine conversations about "cottage cheese and everyone's children," she says.

She also has time to brave the intense emotional weather of these years. It ranges from distilled giddiness that erupts into a dance across the living room floor to sweeping sadness, so distinct from depression, which emerges from the knowledge it might well be the last twirl. Heilbrun shares her antidote for such sadness: Reading, which is treated as special privilege here. Hospitably, she has arranged an abundance of tempting morsels throughout the book -- passages of poetry and prose she knows and loves, from May Sarton and Virginia Wolff to Andrew Marvell and Shakespeare. Should any resonate, an annotated section at the end of the book makes it easy for readers to locate the originals.

It is in reading, Heilbrun suggests, that we find "unmet friends" in the authors, those who have negotiated the same kinds of passages all of us must eventually face. These unmet friends have called upon the same strengths to escape or endure the same situations. Heilbrun delivers a gift that, luckily for us, is not her last: a book not on how to live to be old, but why to love being old.

-- Blythe Woolston is a freelance editor and writer who lives in Billings, Montana.

First published October 20, 2000
Last updated October 27, 2008
Copyright © 2000 Consumer Health Interactive

Back to top of page