The Gift of Years: A Review

Published January 1, 2008. 

Aging provides opportunities for growth, and Chittister describes numerous ways people can develop during late life.
Her book is a series of meditations on the following topics:
Intro/The Purpose of Life, Regret, Meaning, Fear, Ageism, Joy, Authority, Transformation, Newness, Accomplishment, Possibility, Adjustment, Fulfillment, Mystery, Relationships, Tale-Telling, Letting Go, Learning, Religion, Freedom, Success, Time, Wisdom, Sadness, Dreams, Limitations, Solitude, Productivity, Memories, Future, Agelessness, Immediacy, Nostalgia, Spirituality, Loneliness, Forgiveness, Outreach, The Present, Appreciation, Faith, Legacy, Afterword: The Twilight Time.
I recommend just one chapter a week, taking one page a day and thinking about the implications of the ideas. The author doesn't provide a lot of examples. The book is mainly a set of abstractions. However, they can bear fruit if readers generate their own examples.
I also enjoyed the quotes that start each section. I had already encountered about a half dozen of these quotes in my search for thought-provoking quotes on aging that I share on Twitter. However, she had many that I have not found (and some that are great but more than 140 characters).
Chittister's collection of quotes is worth the price of the book alone. Let me share a handful of them:

From "Ageism": "I am sixty-five and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics. But if there were fifteen months in every year, I'd only be forty-eight.  That's the trouble with us: We number everything." James Thurber

From "Joy": "As for old age, embrace and love it. It abounds with pleasure if you know how to use it. The gradually declining years are among the sweetest in life....Even when they have reached the extreme limit they have their pleasure still." Seneca

From "Adjustment": "To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living."  Henri Frederic Amiel

From "Fulfillment": "Old age has a great sense of calm and freedom when the passions have relaxed their hold and have escaped not from one master but from many." Plato

From "Mystery": "For age is opportunity no less / Than youth itself, though in another dress / And as the evening twilight fades away / The sky is filled with stars,  invisible by day." Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 

Again, this is not a good book to read cover-to-cover on vacation. It should be read slowly over a matter of weeks and months. And I can see that it will offer new insights if reread after the passing of time.  Chittister has dug deep and unearthed some real treasures in her quotes, her observations and her invitations to see late life as a period of growth.
Related:
Books on Aging