In her always thoughtful weekly column of ideas called Brain Pickings, Maria Popova quotes the author Ursula Le Guin on the art of growing older gracefully, a subject that is sometimes on my mind.

“For old people, wrote  Le Guin, “beauty doesn’t come free with the hormones, the way it does for the young…it has to do with who the person is.”

But who, asks Popova, is the person we barely recognize staring back at us from the mirror as the decades roll by? The mystery of what makes our childhood selves the same person as the one in the mirror is one of the most challenging questions of life and philosophy.

No one has yet found a good answer to it.

I am always pained and troubled by the fact that there is no decent or compassionate language for growing older, we  older people reflect and often absorb the denigration,  patronization and bigotry that we see reflected about the elderly in culture and politics.

Old people abuse themselves with “old talk,” demeaning jokes and references to infirmity, illness and weakening. At our age. When you get older, etc… Old age is thus a woeful joke, full of references to the things we can no longer do, to our uselessness and helplessness. That  is the language of the aging.

Old talk is a toxic form of self-abuse, always demeaning and often fatal. Old people shouldn’t run for political office, they shouldn’t have sex or live in cold places or walk outside in the snow, let alone shovel it. Old people should downsize, live quietly off the savings they spend their lives collecting, most often in jobs they hated to save money they will never keep.

Aging is expensive in our world, just ask your pharmacist.

But graceful aging isn’t about language for me, it’s about the thinking behind it. It’s about how I feel, not how they feel about me.

In our culture, when the elderly are mentioned at all, it is mostly in terms of how costly they have become, how much care they require, how much help they need, how little they are expected to do, or can do. They are the new invisibles, they have been purged from movies, TV shows, books and magazines.

They are no one’s favorite demographic,  except for pharmaceutical companies and the AARP.

There is certainly no video game anywhere on the earth aimed at older people.

For the elderly, segregation is not a social injustice, it is a sanctioned and government funded way of life, the last acceptable frontier of bigotry and discrimination.

I see in my Mansion and other therapy work how the elderly are rigidly kept apart from the general population, and  from the young especially, whom they almost never see. This is so that young and innocent souls  will not be discouraged or polluted by the aging process.

In our culture, aging and death a great shock to people, mostly because they have never been permitted to see it.

The elderly are shut away behind locked doors, out of sight and mind. The system is happy to profit from their increasingly expensive and inhumane care, but they are otherwise kept hidden behind regulations and privacy laws.

This is why I fight so hard to take my photos at the Mansion, so that these good people will be recognizable human beings, not ghostly figures behind locked doors.

I see all the time that this isn’t their privacy that is being protected behind those doors, it is their suffering and isolation. The elderly are a multi-billion profit center, vampiric corporations get fat off of their sicknesses and death,  but nobody wants to look at them or live with them, let alone help them age with grace and dignity.

I share LeGuin’s view of aging and the way to live gently and gracefully.

I am beginning to be older, as Thomas Merton wrote as he aged. When I look in the mirror,  I do not see myself at the end of life, but at the beginning of a rich and challenging, funny,  and often quite spiritual life. My life is fuller than ever, richer than ever, better than ever.

Yes, it is a shock sometimes to look in the mirror and wonder just who that person is staring back at me. I  have to first get past how he looks, where his hair has gone, at the wrinkles under his eyes, at his pale skin.

But the person inside of that body – in my mirror –  is  full of life and love and promise. In my head, I am a vibrant self, no matter how I look. I have to work at that. That is what aging gracefully means to me. I am not about to disappear or go quietly into the night.

I’m off the script. But I know where I am.

More and more, people look right through me, I imagine myself shuffling a bit, paying attention to balance, my steps are not strong and confident all of the time, I have to think about stairs and steep hills. I go to doctors more than I ever did, and fuss with pills and donut holes. I know the pharmacy refill automated number by heart, and I forget my own cell number sometimes.

I have to think carefully about what I eat, and how much I have to spend on the medicines they tell me I must take to live.

All of those things can chip away at my confidence, make me feel frightened or vulnerable,  they reflect to me how other people are conditioned to see me at times, not just as a person, but as an older person, someone you are aware of but don’t see.

At the vet clinic, the staff will no longer let me carry those big bags of dog food, they just pick them up without asking  – young, strong women – and toss them over their shoulders, heading out to the car. The brawny men and women at the hardware store also carry my purchases out to the car without being asked.  Bob at the dump grabs the trash cans right out of my hands the minute I open the rear door,  and takes them to the garbage bin, he bristles if I even try to carry them.

People open doors for me at the Post Office and bend over quickly to get my mail if I drop it, which I often do.

In the news, I am aware of being discussed, if at all, as one of those people driving everybody’s health care costs up, and my friends and I know quite well what is intended of those costs are cut back or reduced. We are in the way, gorging on entitlements no one can afford, sucking the system dry  They want us to go away, quietly, but still away. We are budget breakers.

And there is some truth to these worries. People are living longer, even as they get sicker. A hundred years ago – hell, 30 years ago – I would be long dead. It used to take about three weeks for people to get sick and die. Now the dying process takes an average of six years.

My heart would not be rebuilt with new blood vessels, it would have stopped. Millions of people are living longer without work to do, or bodies strong enough to live on their own.  And younger people have to pay for it.

That is a staggering problem, and no one is even really talking about it, not directly. It’s hard to even imagine real and humane solutions.

The challenge of aging, apart from the obvious,  is to fill this void gently and lovingly, the void between who we believe we are and and who the world informs me who is staring back at me from my mirror. For me, that is why identity is so important, something to defend and affirm all the time. Because in one way or another, the world is chipping away at all of the time at my identity, from the intrusions of social media to the hysterical rantings of the media.

It is certainly true that our present selves are radically different than our past selves, and neither self can guarantee happiness or meaning.

Rebecca Goldstein wrote this about Personal Identity: “What is it that makes a person the very person that she is, herself alone and not another, an integrity of identity that persists over time, undergoing changes and yet still continuing to be – until she does not continue any longer…”

I like the term “integrity of identity.”

I have learned in recent years that I like and respect the person I am, whatever I look like in the mirror, or to others. I will not be judged by the wrinkles on my face. That is the integrity of identity, I need to like the face I see in the mirror.

One of the realities of aging for me is that I know I am going to die pretty soon, something younger people do not yet know or need to think about. This is not a morbid thought for me, but a reality I want to accept and consider. I know from my hospice therapy work that good deaths are considered deaths. You have to think about death in a world that doesn’t want to talk about it.

The grace of aging is really wisdom, I think, and a spiritual dimension. I have learned a lot of things, about me, about others, about the world.

A friend of mine just sent me one of those unaccountably angry and hurtful messages, she was upset that I expressed concern  because she was living now with her ill mother. How dare I suggest that this new life with her mother was anything but wonderful, how dare I presume to know what she was thinking?

I was, as I often am, astonished by the anger that simmers in people, just below the surface.

Sorry, I said, take care.

And I just let it go. I am too old for this. No more he-said, she-said in my life.

A small thing, a minor thing, but such an important thing to know how to do.

To let go of the confusions, misunderstandings, useless hurting of modern life. To walk right though them and out the other side.

This is the gift of aging. I know how to spend my time, how precious time is, I know not to waste a minute or an  hour. I know to be alone and to love being alone.

I am learning how to live and be loved, I am understanding how to do good in ways that are sensitive and useful. I am learning what is important and what is not.

Big things to me, new things, the miracle of experience. I have made so many awful mistakes I finally know something about how to do some things in the right way. That is a part of growing old gracefully.

I know things about me that other people don’t know: there is much love in my life, my humor, a deepening spirituality, a grace and elegance that comes from having seen a lot and loved a lot.

I think I am beginning to understand how to age gracefully.