Chapter 2 Making Peace with My Body
I lost my prostate in 2010 and half my left ling in 2018. Over the years I learnt to live comfortably with my body. I am now 80.
There's a particular kind of grief that arrives before loss actually does. It shows up in the stiffness that wasn't there last year, in the extra beat it takes to stand up from the floor, in the way my knees announce the weather before the forecast does. I've started calling it what it is: making peace with a body that is quietly, steadily growing old.
I used to think aging would announce itself — one clear morning where everything was suddenly different. It doesn't work that way. It arrives in inches. You almost miss it, until one day you're catching your reflection in a shop window and don't immediately recognize the posture, the softness, the face that's a little more lived-in than the one in your head. I've been quietly grieving the body I used to have for longer than I realized, without saying so out loud.
There's a temptation to fight this. To will myself young again through sheer refusal — pushing through pain that used to be normal, chasing a version of strength that isn't coming back, treating every ache as a problem to be solved rather than a fact to be lived with. I understand that instinct. It comes from the same place as all the love we have for the selves we used to be. But I've learned, slowly, that making peace isn't about pretending nothing has changed. It's about changing alongside my body instead of against it.
So the runs got shorter, but I started noticing more on them — the light, the breath, the strange relief of not needing to prove anything. I used to see that as decline. Now I wonder if it's something closer to wisdom. I'm not slower because I've lost something. I'm slower because I've finally stopped rushing past the parts of being alive that were always worth noticing.
I think what actually needs to age, more than my body, is my expectation of it. I have to stop measuring today against the body I had at twenty-five, at thirty, at thirty-five. That body isn't entirely gone — it's still in there, in the way I still want to move, still feel young in flashes, still forget for a second that anything has changed. But I'm also this body now, the one with the gray hairs and the joints that need warming up, and both of those things get to be true without one erasing the other.
Making peace, I've realized, doesn't mean feeling okay about it all the time. Some nights I still do math I don't want to do — years, decisions, the unbearable arithmetic of a body with a limit. But peace was never about the absence of that ache. It's about not letting the ache steal the time that's still here. It's choosing, on ordinary Tuesday afternoons, to be in this body instead of mourning some other one. To let it set the pace sometimes. To notice, really notice, what it can still do instead of cataloguing what it can't.
I'm not who I was. And somewhere in that unglamorous, ongoing aging, I've found something that looks less like loss and more like a kind of loyalty — the kind that doesn't need this body to stay young to be worth caring for, exactly as it is, right now, aches and all.
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