Last Gift of Time
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Last Gift of Time description
Years ago Carolyn Heilbrun, a long-time feminist (Writing a Woman's Life) who also writes mysteries as Amanda Cross (The James Joyce Murder), decided to leave before age dragged her down by committing suicide at 70. Fortunately, she reneged, and chose instead to chronicle moments from her 60s. Always erudite, often deliciously wry, if sometimes pretentious, Heilbrun hits the mark more often than not in this book of essays. She speaks of "unmet friends" whose lives have paralleled her own and blessed deliverance from the academic bustle and backstabbing of Columbia University, the tyranny of memory, and foolish feminine clothes. Throughout, her sense of renewal is as welcome as her determination to go against the grain. |
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Last Gift of Time Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥
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Thought-provoking and Enriching
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Heilbrun provides an up-close look into her accomplished, then increasingly unconventional life. The main theme of the book is that of re-evaluating her life beyond age sixty. After a thirty-year tenure as an English professor at Columbia University, she was fortunate to enjoy a comfortable income in her retirement. Yet this fact did not spare her from the questioning that often accompanies this momentous life passage.
At age sixty-two, she published "Writing a Woman's Life," where she mused on aging, friendship, marriage, etc. Always a woman of strong convictions, Heilbrun had professed she would commit suicide by age seventy. But she surprised herself when she found her sixties to be quite rewarding.
She credits close friendships with women and colleagues, for making her sixties her happiest decade. While happily married for many years, she also longed for solitude. It was that longing that led her, at age sixty-eight, to take the unusual step of buying what she referred to as her "small house." It was this haven that provided her the space to spend some of her free time contemplating, "To invite one's soul and encounter peace." She was fortunate that her husband understood her need. The first weekend after the purchase, she drove there accompanied by him.
While her life was quite different from mine, I was fascinated by her insights, and her daring to claim the life she wanted, in her later years. Upon learning that she did indeed, commit suicide at age seventy-seven, I was a bit disoncerted. But after digesting the news, I felt an undeniable sense of awe. She took her destiny into her own two hands, literally. Some call that "self-determination." I don't believe she suffered from depression, only that she had a realistic world view, in her own words, "feeling sad about the universe."
The book provides a lot of wisdom, from friends like May Sarton, and helps explain their close, but difficult, realtionship. There are many quotes and insights from other famous writers. Michael Norman, writing in the New York Times magazine, described the life of his eighty-eight year-old aunt. "It's no good," she said. "I'm living too long already. What's the point?"
Heilbrun ponders, "This harsh question, 'what's the point' is judged by some as cruel, unacceptable in our culture. To me, it is a very real question, the question that renders living too long dangerous, lest we live past the right point and our chance to die."
In a chapter "On Mortality" there is a poem by Christina Rosetti, "Song." This verse seems fitting for Heilbrun:
I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain:
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on as if in pain:
And dreaming through the twilight
That does not rise nore set,
Haply I may remember
And haply may forget. |
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