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— from the Introduction to Joan Chittister’s new book,
The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully

It is a January morning in County Kerry. The Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of the craggy islands below
me, is roiled with whitecaps and angry palisades of water crashing against the tiny islets in their rocky
midst. The windstorms of the last two nights have drenched the hills on which this small Irish stone
cottage clings, left them dripping with water from bare branches hours later, sent the tiny rivulet of
water outside my window rushing wildly down the mountainside to the valley below. It is an average
Kerry winter day.

But not average for some. In the last two days of rocking, howling wind, five Irish fishermen and their
trawler have been reported missing at sea. This morning, they were pronounced dead, the sea too wild
yet to even attempt to recover their bodies.

Who they were, how old they were, I do not know. But one thing I do know: life and time are ghosted
creatures for us all. They belong to us—and are not ours at the same time. Some of us, like these
fishermen caught in a season’s windstorm, leave it by surprise. Most of us, like you and me, inch our
way through life, sure on the one hand that it will never end, certain on the other that it will surely be
ending for us soon.

It is at moments of such quiet consciousness that it is important to come face-to-face with what it
means to age, to be older, to be old, to become an elder in society. It is important that age be no
impediment to the magnet of life in us. But life is not about breathing only. Life is about becoming more
than we are, about being all that we can be. Whatever we are doing, however old we are, wherever we
fall on the social-economic scale.

This is a book for those who are on the brink of “old age,” for those who have just received their first
mail message from the Association of Retired People, and knowing themselves to be young and healthy,
are very surprised by it.

But this book is as much for those concerned about their parents and the kinds of issues older age may
be raising in them. It is also for those who want to reflect on the gradual effects of the aging process
in their own lives.

This is, finally, a book for those who do not “feel” old, whatever their chronological age, but who one
day realize with a kind of numbing astonishment that they have not managed to elude it. They are older
than they ever thought they could possibly become despite the fact that inside themselves they feel
no different now than they did a year ago. Except for the telling of years, of course. And, in the end,
those make all the difference.

…But inside, they know themselves to be coming out of one part of life and going into another, clinging
to one but unable to stop themselves from slipping into the other. And they don’t know what to think
about it. Is this the end of everything they know to be good and fulfilling in life? Or is the purpose of
life only now becoming visible?