I struggled with describing this in a novel I've had sitting on my computer drive for a very long time. The novel is about a woman who dies and tries to save her brother. She's met by a guide, who died as a boy as a slave, named Noah Feen. But Feen looks like he's a middle aged man.

When she asks him why he has taken that form, he says he took it to honor what he would have looked like had he not died as a youth.

It's fun stuff to think and write about.