Age strips the provisional identities — the professional, the parent of young children, the body that did what you asked — and what remains is the question of who you are when the roles have been removed. Many traditions locate the deepest self precisely here, in the simplification that mortality enforces. Juana understood this: the library was confiscated, the instruments taken, and still she remained — which means whatever she was, it was not the books.
Each step builds on the last.