The Ravages of Time

Diana Morrison c1983

I came across this old photograph of myself the other day and it made me feel sad.

Ageing is such a cruel process. It creeps up on you stealthily and without mercy. One minute you're fresh faced with glossy abundant hair, flawless skin and a firm, healthy body and then one day you glance in a mirror and scarcely recognise your reflection. The lines around the eyes and mouth begin to appear, very subtly at first. The chin replicates itself like some cancerous cell. Hair loses its shine and colour and becomes finer and more brittle. As for the body - the waistline thickens and bits slowly begin to head south. Niggles of pain soon begin to make themselves apparent, joints begin to click and become less supple and energy levels become depleted more quickly. 

My poor mother never believed herself to be intelligent (she was, of course,) and her looks were everything to her. She was a very attractive woman but began to panic when she hit forty. The amount of money that she would spend on cosmetics and anti-wrinkle creams was outrageous. She became such a slave to maintaining her young, beautiful self that it became an obsession to her. In addition to the cosmetics, she would punish her body with a Jane Fonda work-out for an hour every day, and scarcely eat. We will never be sure whether this worked for her. She did lose a lot of weight, but she also had cancer, and may have had for a couple of years before it was diagnosed. She died at the age of 46, and the only consolation to that was that she never had to grow old. I would give a lot to see how she would look now, as it comes up to what would have been her 69th birthday.

I too, was proud of my looks and do understand what drives people to retain theirs for as long as possible, but I learnt from my mother that you cannot halt the ravages of time and the best thing to do is accept it with good grace.  Whilst there is no need to let yourself go altogether, there is also no need to work so hard that the fun goes out of life because you are constantly thinking about how you look. We all accept that our minds, ideas and outlook on life change as we get older, so why can't we accept that our bodies will do the same thing? 

Having said all this, it's time for me to go for my monthly eye-brow and lip wax!

Diana Morrison (with my beautiful grandaughter) 2012