When Bobby Fox, my grandmother, was well into her 70s, my mother moved her to Norwalk where Mom and Dad were living. Bobby had a small apartment in a retirement community, what we now call an independent living center. Had she chosen to, she could have had three meals a day in the dining room, enjoying the company of the other residents. But she had a tremor which made her hand shake when she drank from a glass or cup, when she fed herself with a fork or a spoon, and she didn't want anyone to see that tremor, so she ate alone.

When my brother married Jennifer four years ago, Mom came up from Florida to the wedding and afterward spent a week with me in Putnam Valley. Visits north had gotten rare; travel was hard for her. That week, there were so many places I wanted to take her, places where there would have been a wheelchair for her use. But she didn't want to be seen in a wheelchair, so we didn't go.

My mother was a model. Her good looks were her stock in trade, though as she grew older, she came to appreciate some of her other assets. Still, as recently as a couple of months before she died, she commented about how, because she'd always been careful to apply moisturizer to her neck as well as her face, she did not have a crepey neck. At 85, she was still holding on to her beauty, even as it fell from her grip. We let go incrementally, and console ourselves with what we've not yet lost.

I turned 63 this past spring. I think a good deal about my aging body. I'm in good health, and am only as limited as my failure to maintain a rigorous exercise schedule makes me. But I see the announcements menopause has written on my skin, my belly, and I know there's more to come. Already I look to see how I identify with various aspects of my physical appearance and capabilities, and they are numerous. Once again the question arises: who am I?

Impermanence. It all goes. There is nothing fixed. Not a mind state, not an emotional state, not a flower, not a piece of fruit, not a tree, a rock, a mountain, the great quadriceps I had when I cycled the streets of New York City, not the jaw line I had when I weighed thirty pounds less, nor the brown hair or the spotless complexion. Zazen is an invitation to be present with impermanence, noticing the breath in perpetual change, the body's comforts and discomforts, the temperature of the air on my skin, the sound of the heat or the air conditioning starting up, shutting off. Breath by breath, I can shed all identities and be the big sky in which all things, I among them, are change.