WHO ME....?

You have to be careful what you laugh it, for in the long run you usually become what you were laughing at. For instance, old....!

The Census Bureau reminds us that next year the first of the Boomer Generation turn 65. The unofficial entrance into the world of gray hairs, brittle bones, squinty eyes and regretted memories. But while the government jousts with the budgetary dragon of money, the newly-arrived old must take up the lance to joust with the barbarous dragon of meaning. You know, the ancient but often deferred questions that accompanied Adam and Eve out of the Garden: why am I here? where am I going? what's it all about?

In the years just after they lost their lease, their descendants huddled around tribal campfires to hear the wise ones (AKA, old guys) speak of the great answers to the great questions. In due time, tribes found among themselves medicine men and temple priests who could address the questions more formally. In later time, societies found among themselves medical scientists who sought to wrestle with the questions in their laboratories.

Today, the graduating boomers have all three sources at their disposal as they relax between the front and back nine. Over a tall cool one there shaded beneath the fairway greens, the young elders have time to reflect on their earlier and glibber answers. Like when they were consumed with raising their children in the happy hope of felicitous retirements....or when they looked at their own aging parents and vowed never to let age do this to them....or when they locked in those portfolios sure to hoist them throughout their own declining years.

Grasses are forever greener just over the next generational fence. However, now the old boomers find themselves in a slow-motion kabuki dance with the Grim Reaper. How in the hell did this happen! How did this come to be so soon! And why without any warning!

Well, here's the funny thing. All of us -- elderly, boomer, and boomer-to-be -- have been witness to this process from the first time we could pluck a flower. Spring...! One day it's not here, then suddenly one day it is here. In all its blooming green wonder. The little signs and signals were nudging and popping for weeks, only we forgot to notice.

Likewise the sudden burst of old age is never all that sudden. It is we not it that is surprised. But now that the boomers sipping tall cool ones are no longer able to defer the conversation, one particular dragon-of-a-question challenges us to subdue it: Is the answer medical science offers us about aging, the best answer to live with? put another way, is warehousing us the best solution? or is it more like the final solution?

This is surely not to say the old ways (ie. sharing a back room in the home of your kids) are better than the new ways (ie. sharing a room in the institution your kids are paying for). As usual, the best answer probably lies somewhere between. Between familial compassion and superior care. Something for each family to locate for itself.

It's just that the aging boomers never had to joust with it so seriously. Nor was it ever topic one on the fairways before.