Twilight Time

Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement is a reflection on memory, aging, and mortality in the form of a collection of short essays that travels back and forth in time. Kaufman invites the reader to accompany her on a journey of inquiry, from a childhood in Jewish New York in the fifties to an unknown future and back again, always returning to the present moment--its colors, its sounds. Twilight Time avoids any sentimentality or nostalgia about the past, as well as any false certainty about the future.

Kaufman, a retired hospice chaplain, suggests that not knowing is the final frontier. She watches reverentially as her older sister ages and her mother's dying unfolds. She entertains the possibility of other life narratives, but recognizes finally that she has been imprinted by her own past in all its singularity, all its wounds. In Twilight Time, Kaufman shares a glimpse of the crowded canvas of who she has been as she prepares to enter the unknown, letting go of it all. Susie Kaufman practices mindfulness in the Plum Village tradition of Thich Nhat Hahn.