I don’t know why, but I’ve never written about my late friend Carolyn Heilbrun much. She was a Columbia professor, a feminist and a mystery writer who encouraged my book writing, and inspired me in many different ways. She taught me what my politics really are – feminism – and helped me understand the struggle of women to find their identify in a world whose beautiful promise is relentlessly destroyed by male greed, anger and cruelty. I have long believed that women’s empathy, sense of community and instincts for nurture are the best hope for our world  – just look at any newscast or political debate – and these are traits I have sought to develop in my own life. Beyond that, Professor Heilbrun wrote powerfully about aging.

Her book “The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty,” opened my eyes to the pain and joy, the loss and promise of aging. “The major danger in one’s sixties — so I came to feel – is to be trapped in one’s body and one’s habits, not to recognize those supposedly sedate years as the time to discover new choices and to act up on them.” My motto.

Heilbrun also shared – and influenced – some of my ideas about health and aging. She believed modern ideas of “health” and medicine stole quality of life from the aging, and turned them into dependent prisoners with little purpose to their lives.  Loss, pain and sadness are inevitable as one ages, Heilbrun wrote, but they are not only sad. They  are the price for bountiful living.

My own life is very relevant in this way and I wish Professor Heilbrun were around for me to talk to. In my sixties, I have found purpose, creativity, love and the beginnings of a spiritual life. I have found bounty beyond imagination. I also have experienced loss and sadness. I am having to pay more attention to my body, accept the loss of friends and loved ones. Heilbrun loved her life in her 60’s, but she always warned her friends that she would not contribute to the corporate/technological/medical aging machine. In her 70’s, healthy and productive and creative, she took her own life, just as she said she would and wrote farewell letters to her friends. I will not share that letter, but I am grateful to have gotten it.

I expect to see the true revolution in feminist consciousness in my lifetime, not the bra-burning protests used by so many to trivialize the women’s movement, but the values that underscore true feminism for me – love, change, compassion, creativity and an end to the human capacity for cruelty, war and environmental destruction. I imagine women working in government working together to solve problems, not exploit and profit from them. I imagine an end to war. I imagine prisons emptying out and shutting down. I imaging jobs becoming nourishing and secure again and communities rising once more to support one another. And of course, everywhere, a love of nature and animals. Carolyn Heilbrun taught me to dream of these things, and helped me see that they are possible. I see these qualities in my wife, my friends, many of my readers, so I know they exist.

And thanks to you, Carolyn, for sending your wonderful ideas out into the world, where they sparkle like embers, and live in my heart. You are all about hope.