Earlier this year, I airily told a friend I’m not afraid of ageing, because (I claimed) I’m not especially attached to how I look. But almost immediately, I began to be surprised and dismayed by the face I see in the mirror. I may not expect beauty, but as a nearly-50-year-old, it’s already hard to let go of the image of myself I didn’t even realise I carry.

Carol Lefevre puts a name to that bewildering feeling – homesickness for the self – in her exquisite essay on the hidden grief of ageing. Women, she says, often begin to experience it around 50, when their bodies “send the implacable signal that things have changed”. And as she approached her own 70th birthday, she realised she was about to cross a border: soon she would “be old, no question”.

Lefevre describes the nostalgia of recognising our distance from an irrecoverable youth as coming with “a jolt of emotion that felt like a bereavement”. But as with homesickness, she says, how badly we suffer depends on how we manage our relationship with the past – and our own internalised ageism.

She draws on personal reflection, her interviews with people aged 70 and older, and research and literature that speak perfectly to the grief, nostalgia and cognitive dissonance of ageing. “How can I be old?” asks nine-year-old Harriet, in a Penelope Lively story, when her mother says she’ll be her grandmother’s age one day. “I’m me.”

Lefevre says every one of her interviewees “"admits to feeling a vivid sense of the past, and the continuing presence of a younger self”. Jo, aged 84, points to a photograph of himself as a joyful, exuberant three-year-old as representing his essence.

Part of the grief of late-stage ageing, Carol reflects, is the “last man standing” loneliness of having lost everyone who knew you when you were young. But, she reminds us, it’s a privilege to become very old, too: “our bodies are capable of more severe betrayals than mere flabby armpits”.

Australia’s National Ageing Institute is addressing ageism with a language guide that asks us to avoid terms like “old person”. But, Lefevre argues, wouldn’t it be better to destigmatise the word “old” rather than avoid it?

“Old people need to start claiming their years with pride,” she concludes. While we can’t return to our younger selves, old age can be a kind of homecoming.

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