Dr. Peter Whitehouse gives his elderly patients with memory loss an unexpected prescription: Stay socially active. Some of his favorite advice is to perform volunteer work, and he has even created a school where they can do just that.

Whitehouse and his wife, Cathy, founded an inner-city charter school in Cleveland called The Intergenerational School eight years ago. It’s common to see the school’s young students working with older volunteers, including many who have Alzheimer’s disease.

Research has already shown that volunteering conveys benefits for older people who do not have dementia. One study of older individuals who did regular volunteer work in schools through a program called Experience Corps suggested that the volunteers increased their physical strength and were less likely to use a cane or fall down. The study also found that volunteering increased social activity, which may ward off depression and isolation. Volunteers also reported increases in cognitive activity, saying they read more books and watched less television.

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Watch it all and note the key role of the rabbi in the leader’s work.

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“Tell your readers that widowhood has little to recommend it. I still miss my husband dreadfully.”

–LaVonne Neff, “Three Women Out of Four: How the church can meet the needs of its widows,” Christianity Today (Nov 8, 1985), p. 30

No family action more fully reveals the glory of Christian grace than to see children lovingly supplying the needs of their older parents — visiting them, making them feel comfortable, loved and wanted if they have to be supported outside the home, or opening their homes and allowing them to be a central part of their life. I am grateful that my wife’s mother lived with us for twenty-seven years in our home, and was loved and enjoyed as part of our family during all that time. Now, because of her failing health, it is necessary for her to be in a nursing home, but we visit her very often, we never let her feel lonely and unwanted.

I have been in rest homes that were horror pits, where older people were abandoned by their families — some of them Christian families. Month after month went by and no one went to visit these older people; they drifted off into senility. These homes, where people simply exist, are like animal cages.

There is a great ministry open to many in the congregation who have time to visit these homes and be surrogate children to older parents who have no one to look out for them. This is a wonderful, loving ministry for some to undertake. The apostle closes by saying that God takes note of these things; he is concerned about the weak and the helpless.

It is interesting to observe today that economic conditions are now forcing families to face up to these obligations. On the Today Show the other day, a family from the Midwest was interviewed. The children had grown up and established their own homes, while the parents were living alone in the big old house. The house was too big for the parents to keep up and they were contemplating selling it, but then economic pressure began to force the children, who had moved away, to find some way of solving their problems. They all ended up mutually agreeing to move back into the old home — the parents, children, and grandchildren. They worked out loving arrangements — a certain part of the house was kept free for the grandparents to escape to when the clutter and noise became too much. This family recaptured elements that were lost by the independent desire of each family to have a home of its own.

We have lost so much of the interrelationships between generations. God is forcing us, by economic means, to face up again to the need to live together and to enjoy one another.

—Ray Stedman (in 1981)

Shopping is the least of it. Everywhere I go, I meet people who would never have lived so long if they’d been born a few decades earlier. Indeed, I’m one of them; I’d likely be deaf without penicillin for childhood ear infections, and dead without the al­but­erol inhaler that was only approved in the U.S. in 1981. Western New York is not the mighty economic colossus that once let Buffalo boast more millionaires per capita than any other city in America, but it is still a better place to live in now than it was then. And it is getting better all the time.

That, too, is our future. Aging will make the economy grow more slowly than we would like, and probably more slowly than we are used to. Social Security and Medicare will almost certainly be financed by a combination of benefit cuts, increased taxes, and higher retirement ages””which means that all of us will work longer than we want to, and pay more in taxes than we have before.

The political battles over all of this will be bitter, and they will probably be, too often, won by the retirees, who vote in force (though not always as a bloc). Those same retirees may also vote against things that are actually in their interest””thus shutting out the immigrants who could help them stay at home, and out of the nursing home, longer; turning down school taxes that could create a more productive workforce to support them; fighting for zoning restrictions that make it harder for the low-income workers who provide their services to live within easy commuting distance.

But if we will be worse off than we could be in an ideal world, we will still be better off than we are now, workers and retirees alike. We’ll not only be at least somewhat richer; we’ll also have years and years more to enjoy our health and wealth. The past in Newark is lovely, but the future, while not without its blemishes, is likely to be better still.

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Decades of declining birthrates are causing a rapid aging of many nation’s populations.

Romanian President Traian Basescu recently warned that his country’s population was declining and that more needs to be done to support women who have children, the Associated Press reported Sept. 18.

“Romania urgently needs to revise its demographic policies,” he told participants at a conference on population and development in the city of Sibiu. The nation has 4 million people in the work force, while retirees number 6 million, according to the Associated Press.

Germany is another country feeling the pinch of a declining and older population, the New York Times reported Sept. 23. The population started declining in 2003, with a drop of 5,000 that year. By 2006 the decrease reached 130,000.

The German population is experiencing “exponential negative growth,” Reiner Klingholz, director of the Berlin Institute for Population and Development, told the New York Times.

The situation in Japan is also causing widespread concern, reported the British newspaper the Telegraph in a June 1 article. The population peaked at 128 million in 2005 and some forecasts expect it to drop below 100 million by 2050.

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From Religious Intelligence:

Of the 3.2 million people going to church on an average Sunday in England, over 900,000 are 65 or over. That is one person in nine over 65 in the entire country.

The opportunity therefore to reach out to other folk in the country is huge, which is exactly what Manchester diocese found when they started their “Back to Church” campaign in 2005, and what the recently published Tearfund survey showed of some 3 million waiting to be invited back to church. A good many of such people are older people.

Through the wonders of modern health science we are living longer on average, and over the past 50 years the expectation of life, for both men and women, is some eight or nine years more, although women usually continue to live longer than men. Since until very recently the normal retirement age was 60 or 65 (that is, the extra years were not translated into an extended working life), these “extra years” being mostly when people are between 65 and 74. Those who are 75 today are often of similar health and energy as those who were 65 in 1957.

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There may be another compelling reason to save and that is that while many aspects of retirement savings are predictable, the big unknowable is health care costs. “If you believe in the logic of the life cycle model, then once you get used to peanut butter, all else follows,” said Jonathan Skinner, a economics professor at Dartmouth College who has studied retirement issues and recently wrote a paper titled “Are You Sure You’re Saving Enough for Retirement?” for the National Bureau of Economic Research. “That’s the assumption that I am questioning: Do people want to be stuck in peanut butter in retirement?”

He said he came to the conclusion that a strategy to reduce retirement expenses “will be dwarfed by rapidly growing out-of-pocket medical expenses.” He noted projections based on the Health and Retirement Study, a survey of 22,000 Americans over the age of 50 sponsored by the National Institute on Aging found that by 2019, nearly a tenth of elderly retirees would be devoting more than half of their total income to out-of-pocket health expenses. He said, “These health care cost projections are perhaps the scariest beast under the bed.”

As Victor Fuchs, the professor emeritus of economics and health research and policy at Stanford University, told me, money is most useful when you are old because it makes all the difference whether you wait for a bus in the rain to get to the doctor’s appointment or you ride in a cab.

“Saving for retirement may ultimately be less about the golf condo at Hilton Head and more about being able to afford wheelchair lifts, private nurses and a high-quality nursing home,” Professor Skinner said.

His best advice for people in their 20s and 30s: maximize workplace matching contributions, seek automatic savings mechanisms like home mortgages and hope “that their generation can still look forward to solvent Social Security and Medicare programs.”

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At some point in life, you can’t live on your own anymore. We don’t like thinking about it, but after retirement age, about half of us eventually move into a nursing home, usually around age 80. It remains your most likely final address outside of a hospital.

To the extent that there is much public discussion about this phase of life, it’s about getting more control over our deaths (with living wills and the like). But we don’t much talk about getting more control over our lives in such places. It’s as if we’ve given up on the idea. And that’s a problem.

This week, I visited a woman who just moved into a nursing home. She is 89 years old with congestive heart failure, disabling arthritis, and after a series of falls, little choice but to leave her condominium. Usually, it’s the children who push for a change, but in this case, she was the one who did. “I fell twice in one week, and I told my daughter I don’t belong at home anymore,” she said.

She moved in a month ago. She picked the facility herself. It has excellent ratings, friendly staff, and her daughter lives nearby. She’s glad to be in a safe place ”” if there’s anything a decent nursing home is built for, it is safety. But she is struggling.

The trouble is ”” and it’s a possibility we’ve mostly ignored for the very old ”” she expects more from life than safety. “I know I can’t do what I used to,” she said, “but this feels like a hospital, not a home.” And that is in fact the near-universal reality.

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