Years had done their work on Wendy Darling and she did not pretend otherwise or resist what time brought.
Her face had lines now and her joints ached in cold weather and she tired more easily than she once had.
But there was a quality in her that her grandchildren noticed and could not fully explain to themselves.
When she told the Neverland stories she seemed to inhabit them rather than simply to be recalling them.
She did not describe flying over London from the outside — she seemed to be flying over it in the telling.
The stories had kept something in her permanently available that most people allowed to close and lock.
Her imagination had been exercised every night for sixty years through storytelling and it had never stiffened.
Imagination keeps us young no matter how old we are.

Wendy Darling in old age presents a quietly radical counterexample to the standard narrative about aging and loss.
The standard narrative says that youth ends and imagination fades and wonder becomes impossible to sustain over time.
Wendy's example suggests that this narrative is descriptive of what often happens, not prescriptive of what must happen.
She is old by every external measure but internally she retains the quality that Peter Pan maintained through fantasy alone.
Her method was different from Peter's — she did not refuse to grow up, she grew up while keeping the essential thing.
The essential thing was the active imagination — the habit of entering stories fully and inhabiting them with genuine feeling.
This habit, practiced consistently across decades, had become so deeply embedded that aging could not dislodge or diminish it.
The lesson is not that growing up is optional but that what growing up costs us is sometimes negotiable if we are deliberate.
Imagination keeps us young no matter how old we are.