They’re coming out of the woodwork now.

Word travels, I guess.

That there’s a woman down the hall who gives you her time. Who takes you seriously. Who actually knows what she’s doing with a body. And so, one by one, they’ve started coming to find me — and every week there’s a new one sitting across from me in my office.

They’re in their 80s, most of them. And more of them than you’d ever guess were dancers once. Professional dancers. Yoga teachers. Women who spent a whole life inside their bodies, who knew their bodies the way you know a language you’ve spoken since birth.

It always starts the same way. Careful. A little formal. They tell me about the ways it hurts now. The surgeries, the long list of them, the years. They tell me, because it’s always sitting right there at the top, about their husbands. The ones who are sick. The ones with Alzheimer’s, disappearing a little more each week. The ones who are dying.

And I just listen. And I tell them the true things. Yes, that makes sense. No, you don’t have to do that. Yes, you can. Yes. You are.

And something happens when I say it. Something in them unlocks.

Because then they start to show me.

The shoes come off, right there in my office, so I can see the toes, broken and bent and reshaped by decades on pointe, a map of a life spent on the tips of the feet. A shirt gets lifted so I can see the spine, the place where it doesn’t run straight anymore, where the years pressed it into a new shape.

They show me. That’s the part I can’t get over. They don’t just tell me their bodies changed- they reveal them to me. This is what it looks like now. This is what became of the instrument. Here, look.

I don’t think I can explain what it means to be trusted like that.

An 85-year-old woman who danced her whole life, deciding that you are safe enough, that you see her enough, to take off her shoe and show you her feet. That’s not a medical appointment. That’s something closer to confession. That’s a woman handing you the whole story of her body and trusting you to hold it gently.

So I hold it gently. It’s the least I can do. It might be the most important thing I do.

These women don’t come from where I come from.

They were raised in a time when a woman’s body wasn’t hers to build. There was no one on television showing them it was allowed to be strong, allowed to be intense, allowed to take up space, allowed to be powerful. Nobody handed them permission. Strength training wasn’t for them. They were meant for the kitchen, for softness, for making themselves smaller.

So they come to me unsure of themselves. Genuinely unsure whether they’re even allowed to want what I’m offering.

But very, very sure of one thing: that their body can’t anymore. That the door is closed. That whatever they used to be able to do is simply gone now, and the only thing left is to manage the decline.

And that’s the thing I get to argue with. Gently. Every week.

Yes, you can. We can.

You can walk around downtown again. I will teach you how to get there. You can move again. Not like you did at 25, no. But you are not done.

Come and see me. Come and talk to me. Come and move with me. We can do this, you and I.

I keep thinking about what a strange and holy job this is.

Because I know where these women are in their lives. This is the last chapter. The home stretch. Nobody’s pretending otherwise, least of all them. There is no version of this where I hand them back the body they had at 30, and we both know it.

But that was never what they needed.

What they needed was for someone to look at them. Really look, at the toes and the spine and the whole decorated map of it and say:

there is still movement in you. There is still a body here that belongs to you. And you are allowed to love it, and use it, and live inside it, for as long as you have it.

That’s the gift. Not more years. I can’t give anyone more years.

Just this: the chance to be awake inside the body you have left.

To keep dancing, in whatever form dancing takes now. A walk downtown, a stretch in the morning, getting yourself up off the floor one more time under your own power.

They spent their whole lives being told a woman’s body was for being looked at. And here, at the very end, I get to be the one who tells them the truth their bodies always knew:

it was for moving. It was always, only, for moving — right up until the last dance.

And it isn’t over yet.