SENIORS RESOLVE TO ENJOY LIFE AS IT COMES

Today's generation of seniors are not content to sit idly and watch their lives slip past them

By Jim LevineThis Week Staff
Published Saturday January 5th, 2008
Appeared on page A6
It's that time of the year again, when we make resolutions that all add up to one big denial of everything fun.
We won't, as we age, indulge in things like gravy, even though it is one of nature's most perfect sauces.
We won't overeat on leftover sweets from the Christmas season for fear it will cause us to gain a pound or two.
We will exercise every day even though just getting out of bed in the morning is becoming a bit of a chore.
And, we'll use moderation in all things, though our energy for indulging in life's excesses tempers our personalities all on its own.
As we grow older, it's a fact that we ultimately develop some kind of illness or infirmity. Hips give out, joints ache, just the simple act of remembering where the car keys are requires considerable effort sometimes.
The meanest thing of all that our society has created is the blame game when we get ill.
We develop diabetes, for example, and people can't wait to scold us for a lifetime's indulgence in divinity fudge.
Our liver gives out, and the neighbourhood sages wisely agree there were a few too many beer cartons piled up at the bottom of our drive-ways on Boy Scout bottle drive day.
We develop late onset asthma or some other breathing difficulties, and there's always a friend or relative who remembers how you loved your cigarettes in your 20s.
The underlying message is the same: You're sick now. You're going to cost the medical system money now. And it's clearly your fault.
Well, it isn't. If I have one clear resolve in 2008, it is that I will unabashedly go on living as best and as wildly I can into my old age, and refuse to be cowered into a dull existence because sometime or other, illness will strike.
We treat our cars with more respect than our older residents. When a relatively new car needs a brake job, we don't scold the vehicle for stopping when pressure was applied to the peddle.
When it needs an oil job or new sparkplugs, we accept it is part of life's maintenance plan, and fix it.
But let grandmother or grandfather get ill, and apparently it's the natural extension of an ill-lived life.
The reality of life is that if you live long enough, just about everything you enjoyed in your youth will wind up causing cancer, crippling you, or destroying parts of your brain power.
The longer you live, the more chance there is that the unwitting acts of our youth will come back to haunt us.
We need to go to the hospital on occasion to get a tune-up and continue to drive at full speed what miles are left in us.
Our aging generation is not solely responsible for our escalating health-care costs.
In fact, a 33-page study by senior economic Marc Lee with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives debunks the "myth" of runaway costs as baby boomers enter their final years.
The research paper actually shows that the ageing baby-boomer generation will add less than one per cent to health-care costs each year.
And it says the cost of maintaining the health-care system well into the future will be easily met by economic growth.
Health-care costs, the study found, do not rise uniformly just because people are aging.
In fact, most of the costs associated with aging occur in the last year of life, at rates about 50 to 100 times higher than seniors in general.
Using published health-care and population data, Lee concluded that aging contributed a mere 0.8 per cent to the cost of public health care in the last decade.
So as we seniors enter 2008, let's stop feel bad about being a blight on the health care system.
We will take reasonably good care of ourselves, since that is only common sense.
But we must resolve to stop feeling guilty if something goes out of whack, and stop feeling like a burden to the system we paid taxes our whole life to create.
Now I must run. I believe there's still a few shortbreads left from Christmas to polish off before I have a nap.