From the author of Writing a Woman's Life  comes an inspirational reflection on aging and the gift of life in your 70s and beyond.  When she was young, distinguished author and critic Carolyn Heilbrun solemnly vowed to end her life when she turned seventy. But on the advent of that fateful birthday, she realized that her golden years had been full of unforeseen pleasures. Now, the astute and ever-insightful Heilbrun muses on the emotional and intellectual insights that brought her "to choose each day for now, to live." There are reflections on her new house and her sturdy, comfortable marriage; sweet solitude and the pleasures of sex at an advanced age; the fascination with e-mail and the joy of discovering unexpected friends. Even the encroachments of loss, pain, and sadness that come with age cannot spoil Heilbrun's moveable feast. They are merely the price of bountiful living. When she was young, distinguished author and critic Carolyn Heilbrun solemnly vowed to end her life when she turned seventy. But on the advent of that fateful birthday, she realized that her golden years had been full of unforeseen pleasures. Now, the astute and ever-insightful Heilbrun muses on the emotional and intellectual insights that brought her "to choose each day for now, to live." There are reflections on her new house and her sturdy, comfortable marriage; sweet solitude and the pleasures of sex at an advanced age; the fascination with e-mail and the joy of discovering unexpected friends. Even the encroachments of loss, pain, and sadness that come with age cannot spoil Heilbrun's moveable feast. They are merely the price of bountiful living. young, distinguished author and critic Carolyn Heilbrun solemnly vowed to end her life when she turned seventy. But on the advent of that fateful birthday, she realized that her golden years had been full of unforeseen pleasures. Now, the astute and ever-insightful Heilbrun muses on the emotional and intellectual insights that brought her "to choose each day for now, to live." There are reflections on her new house and her sturdy, comfortable marriage; sweet solitude and the pleasures of sex at an advanced age; the fascination with e-mail and the joy of discovering unexpected friends. Even the encroachments of loss, pain, and sadness that come with age cannot spoil Heilbrun's moveable feast. They are merely the price of bountiful living. Carolyn G. Heilbrun  is the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities Emeriti at Columbia University. In addition to her many works of criticism, which include the bestselling  Writing a Woman’s Life  and  Hamlet’s Mother and Other Women , she is also the author of the acclaimed Kate Fansler series of mysteries under the name of Amanda Cross. PREFACE       Since [nature] has fitly planned the other acts of life’s drama, it is not likely that she has neglected the final act as if she were a careless playwright. —CICERO, De Senectute   LOOKING BACK, I can now perceive myself, a woman already in her sixties, engrossed in the question of what alterations in her life a woman might undertake upon turning fifty. In my writings, my public remarks, and my daily cogitations, I had concentrated on how a woman might best contemplate the start of a decade I had long since passed. This turning point of fifty, I had become convinced, ought to form as vital a milestone in a woman’s life as graduation, promotion, marriage, or the birth or adoption of a child. At fifty, I had concluded, a woman might celebrate a rite of passage, a ritual as regularly marked as a confirmation. Trying to develop a ritual for this crossroads—the point at which a woman has lived thirty years of adult life in one mode and must discover a new mode for the second thirty years likely to be granted her—I wanted to suggest, to (if I am honest) urge women to see this new life as different, as a beginning, as a time requiring the questioning of all previous habits and activities, as, inevitably, a time of profound change.   When I was already sixty-two, I published Writing a Woman’s Life, a work in which I proposed that female lives be looked at differently than had been customary for those writing biographies of women, or for women writing autobiographies, or for women looking anew at their own lives. I mused not only on aging but on friendship, marriage, and the gambits women used to escape a conventional and defining life, maneuvers of which the motive was often unconscious. Later, in articles and speeches, I suggested that aging might be gain rather than loss, and that the impersonation of youth was unlikely to provide the second span of womanhood with meaning and purpose.   What I had scarcely considered at all was the decade I was myself just passing through, the sixties. I, who had thought only of the rite of passage at fifty, have now discovered, at seventy, that the past ten years, the years of my sixties, were in their turn notably rewarding. (I am, of course, aware that