When I imagined my later years, back when I still had a self to imagine them from, I pictured a dignified continuation of Marilyn — Marilyn with more leisure, Marilyn traveling, Marilyn the accomplished retiree.

I never once pictured becoming someone else entirely.

But that, it turns out, is what the good version of getting older actually asks of you, and no one says so, because it sounds like a loss.

You have to be willing to let the person you were be finished, so that a new person has room to come up in the cleared ground — a person who is, in my case, less impressive and far happier, who knows less and laughs more, who has traded the corner office for a plank table and does not, when she is honest, miss the trade at all.

Marilyn was who I was to the world.