Dialogue with Age

“Do not go gentle into that good night” wrote the poet Dylan Thomas (1951). This line repeats itself constantly to my ear, especially in this Dialogue with Age. When Thomas cried out against the onslaught of aging and the looming of dying, I was then a young woman who had already borne the injustices of the death of a young, loving husband—also a hysterectomy, open heart surgery, a divorce, and the pains of life with equanimity. Then I gallantly fought back against that “Good Night,” but now, it beckons me to that Garden of Eden.