An ancient Japanese tradition holds that an object that is broken can be made stronger and more beautiful than before by mending it with gold, and this is the metaphor Claire Pennington applies to herself in the journey described in A Gold-Mended Life. A Gold-Mended Life is about baby boomers and older persons with attitude who aren't ready to exchange life and love for an afghan and a plate of cookies, whose smarts and sexuality can be envied, and who will not submit to the myth that aging is a disease, where you sit around stringing beads in heaven's waiting room. Talk about a late bloomer-- Claire is a sixty-year-old mother of three, newly separated, and giving her "stagnant quo" life a jolt by getting her first job in decades and taking her graying hair back to college and into counseling. If love is work, she and her husband failed to get the job done, and now Claire finds herself in a youth-worshipping society determined to "mend" her fractured life. As she evolves, she meets Edith, an eighty-year-old snorkeling sage who models courageous aging and probes difficult questions-- how does a death not learned from become a wasted death, and does death get easier with practice? She also befriends Cedric, a gay man with a warm sense of humor who longs for a friendship family. In her new job at a senior center, she advocates for the rights of seniors, including one who is being abused by her adult child. Claire finds a lover, Scott, sixty-five, who despite erectile dysfunction, shows her the sensual art of full body sex without the enhancer. But just as Claire's life gets on track, her husband Ross comes back, full of regret and asking for forgiveness in the face of his cancer diagnosis. Claire faces a daunting choice; embracing her new life or healing her old one.