"The old dog barks backward without getting up. I can remember when he was a pup." Robert Frost.

Like any other age, late life has its unique challenges and rewards. And most of our declines and losses are inevitable as we eventually become living/dying proof of the laws of nature. The main thing for those of us who are "aging" is not to give up on living, and not throw in our cards at the first sign of a bad hand. That is, giving in at the first sign of a serious personal illness, or the death of a husband or wife or dear friend. We must become attentive to two certainties: we're all going to naturally decline in mind and body, and we're all going to die.

Living well through all of that depends on our having accepted, earlier in life, say in our middle 60's (that was 11 years ago for me), that our eventual death might well be in the next decade, and maybe a few years for "good behavior?" A renewed awareness of life's limits in time should cause us to live life in the "here and now."

If one's life is centered around the fear of the future, and if worrying about tomorrow occupies us more than enjoying today, then it's time to run, or walk, or limp, or hobble, or crawl, or roll, as fast as one can away from the barren valley of self-pity and despair. Our young are watching and learning from us how to live and how to die. One's final accomplishment in life should not be to make one's family, and onself, miserable with our self-pity. And we should not lay guilt trips on our middle-aged children because they devote more time to their growing family than to us. We might be demanding too much of their time simply because we are unwilling to help ourselves as much as we possibly can.

Consider this, each time we call on our middle aged young to physically care for us, whether we really need them or not, there is an interruption in their raising their own kids, your grandchildren. It seems to me that the old and the middle-aged have a huge responsibility in the raising of the third generation. In fact, the reason for a "family" is to have and care for the coming generation. It's "unnatural" to think of children as by-products of sex, when the main reason for our sexual appetite is to produce children, but that's another column.

Grown children best "repay"for their upbringing by raising their children well, not by becoming a nursemaid to you. Your children repay you only when they work hard to raise their own kids well.

In caring for their children young people are rewarded every day by seeing their babies sprouting like Springtime. But when you call on your children unnecessarily, there is no such natural reward for them in taking care of you. Our lives, unlike young children, aren't budding and unfolding in fantastically beautiful ways each day. Our "leaves" are naturally getting ready to drop, and that's not rewarding for our children. There's a Yiddish proverb that goes something like this, "When the father helps the son, both laugh. When the son helps the father, both cry." No child wants to uncover the nakedness of his father or mother. No father or mother wants to stand incompetent before their children. It doesn't matter how loving and caring the family is toward each other. So why would we rush the process?

I've seen independent eighty-five-year-old folks who seldom called on their children. And I've seen sixty-five years old, reasonably healthy, people make an art of whining. "Pre-need" whining is made more vivid, and less tolerable, in my mind when one compares it to loving, heroic, spouses taking care of their seriously ailing mates. When a husband or wife acquires Alzheimer's disease or some other progressive disability, the initial caregiver is usually the spouse, and that responsibility usually comes at a time when he or she is just scarcely physically and emotionally up to the task. Such tasks seem harder for men to fulfill. However, I've seen fidelity, loyalty, devotion, and love, poignantly displayed from the least likely of men when the marriage bed becomes a place of medical and emotional support. Such love, after decades of marriage, gives the vow, "for better or worse," real meaning. One wonders how many people ever thought that such caregiving at the end of life was being pledged those many years ago? Yet, we have seen with our own eyes many a husband and wife rise to the occasion with strength and dignity, both from patient and heathier mate.

There is something else to be considered in any discussion of aging. Growing old is NOT A DISEASE! It's the end of a life cycle. There is a proper season as mortal beings for us to be replaced, and for our families to be renewed by the generations to follow. Yet, we keep seeking a "cure" for old age is if it were a disease. We try to find the right vitamin supplement, or the right pill, prescribed by the right doctor, so that we can "cure" our way out of old age. It is foolish to act and speak as if medical progress will liberate us from the realities of decline, long term debility, and death, or from our unavoidable helplessness, at the "end days" of our lives. The only natural way out of that gloomy scenario is to live free of illness to the very end of our lives, and then die suddenly.

Seems to me that if you want to avoid living the last five or ten years of your life in a nursing home, one should, at, say, about age seventy, start drinking whole milk, use real butter, go back to eating bacon and eggs or sausage biscuits every morning for breakfast, and whatever else one likes, including salt, sugar (except for diabetics), and great tasting cholesterol laden cuts of meat, and chocolate "turtles." That's what I'm doing at age 71. I believe in the experimental method, though perhaps it will be for my next of kin to let you know how it turns out.

Kenneth Kinchen is an independent writer with a background in international business and foreign service contracting.