Title: The last gift of time
Subtitle: life beyond sixty
First published: 1997
Description: When she was a young woman, distinguished author and critic Carolyn Heilbrun made a solemn resolution not to live past "three score years and ten." Taking her own life at the age of seventy, she reasoned, would give closure to a life well lived. But on the advent of her seventieth birthday she realized that the past ten years, the years of her sixties, had been filled with unexpected pleasures. As a consequence, Heilbrun writes: "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 earnestly because it is a choice." With the wry humor and clarity of vision that have long marked her work, Carolyn Heilbrun writes with honesty about the emotional and intellectual insights that brought her "to choose, each day for now, to live."
Subjects: Aging, American Authors, American Women authors, Authors, American, Biography, Old age, Older women, Women authors, American, Aged women, New York Times reviewed, Women authors
Places: United States
People: Carolyn G. Heilbrun (1926-), Carolyn G. Heilbrun (1926-2003)
Time periods: 20th century
LC classification: PS3558.E4526 Z465 1997