Aging into Acceptance

In chapter six of Leo Tolstoy’s 1886 novella The Death of Ivan Ilych, Ivan recalls a classic syllogism learned during his school days: "Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal." Yet, he is entirely unable to apply this logic to himself. The disconnect between the abstract idea of death and his own personal death is too great to bridge. Instead, Ivan’s thoughts shift back to himself as little Vanya, to the smell of his striped leather ball and the rustle of his mother’s silk dress, and to the thought: "And it cannot be that I should die. It would be too terrible."

Now, at seventy-one, I find myself caught in that same disconnect between abstract reasoning and personal knowing. Perhaps, when contemplating our own mortality, we all are.

"Before I got dressed, I glanced down at my naked, sagging body and thought: So what?"

I am no stranger to death. Few of us in our seventies are. We have watched parents, siblings, and loved ones pass. We have read memoirs and novels, listened to podcasts, and watched movies about death. We have done our share of weeping over real and fictional losses. 

Yet, the disconnect continues—even when our own aging faces greet us in the mirror, demanding that we confront loose flesh, age spots, and wrinkles. In response, we might find ourselves turning to gym memberships, cosmetic procedures, or supplements to manage the visible effects of aging. 

Or, perhaps, we simply despair. 

I was firmly in the despair camp from my mid- to late sixties, but I am currently in the process of converting to the despair-not camp.

Let me go back first, like Ivan, to my youth.

I was a child model in New York City for a few years. I was nice looking, though admittedly never a knockout. I floated through my teens, twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, and half of my sixties looking youngish. I poured my energy into academics and my career as an English professor, which allowed me to steer away from focusing on my appearance. The workplace pressures to look good and youthful were never huge. I dressed well enough, looked good enough, and felt good enough.

Raising two high-maintenance boys turned my hair gray, and a long-term marriage to another academic writer had its challenges. But my midlife and mid-career were ordinary—full of failures and some less frequent but hard-earned successes.

Then, one day about five years ago, while driving to the grocery store, I caught a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror: a wrinkled face with darkening bags beneath my eyes. I immediately thought something was wrong with the mirror. Alarmed, I promised myself I would check my face when I got home.

The mirror had not been wrong. My face had turned into a web of wrinkles—something horrific, almost overnight. Had I not really seen myself over the years? Had I overlooked what I had morphed into? Yes and yes. I was sixty-six at the time. Soon after, when the coronavirus pandemic arrived, my university offered my husband and me a fabulous severance package. We retired and moved to western North Carolina.

Now seventy-one, I have lived with my wrinkled face and baggy under-eyes for these past five years. With the luxury of more free time, I began to make up for my decades-long lack of vanity with a new, almost continual obsession with my looks. Each morning, standing before the mirror, I would lift the sides of my face, trying to imagine a facelift. I bought anti-wrinkle creams and tried expensive aesthetic treatments. There was an emergency, I thought, and—quite literally—I did not know how to face it.

Just this morning, I again stared at my wrinkled face in the bathroom mirror. Before I got dressed, I glanced down at my naked, sagging body and thought: So what?

Perhaps the universe is asking me to get over myself, turn inward, renegotiate what matters, and let go of superficial concerns. However, in a culture obsessed with youth and beauty, this kind of redirect is not easy.

Nevertheless, I reckoned I would try. Yet no sooner had I made this mental resolve than I found myself scrolling through Instagram over breakfast. My feed aggressively lit up with glamorous septuagenarians selling enticing anti-aging snake oils. Even the algorithms, it seemed, refused to let me grow old in peace.

It is afternoon now, and I have been writing about wrinkles and loose skin for hours—which is, in itself, just another manifestation of my obsession. 

But letting go of our youth is precisely where Ivan’s disconnect happens. We fight the reflection because we fight the inevitable. In the novella, Ivan—unwillingly at first, then inevitably at last—is forced to face his own death. As we all will.

I think I will go eat lunch now. It will be a simple, low-calorie, high-protein meal. I want to take care of my internal body—the heart that pumps, the lungs that expand, the quiet internal machinery that has faithfully kept me alive. I am thinking that I want to move through my remaining days with respect and gratitude for this aging vessel, granting myself a hard-won release from societal pressures, vanity, and an exhausting fear of the clock.

Ultimately, the goal is to shift my focus from looking good to deeper concerns. It is the practice of radical acceptance.   

Rather than wait, as Ivan did, until death itself forces me to confront this truth, I am choosing to accept my own aging and eventual death now and to bridge the disconnect: All humans are mortal. I am a human. I am mortal.

Robin Greene is a writer in North Carolina. She previously served as the director of Methodist University’s writing center and is the author of five books.