For a long time, it seemed like the costs and stresses of senior caregiving was one of those huge silent burdens being shared by women of a certain age.

Well, it wasn't really silent if you got talking to someone--a co-worker or friend who was in the same boat. A friend who works in the counseling field tells me that much of her clientele are women trying to manage the emotional and financial stresses of caring for their moms.

But now the costs, difficulties and societal impact of caring for aging parents in decline has taken center stage in the media, most profoundly in Michael Wolff's detailed and honest account of his family's struggle to care for his mother in this week's New York Magazine, A Life Worth Ending.

Sandra Tsing Loh opened the gates back in March with her Atlantic article, Daddy Issues: Why caring for my aging father has me wishing he would die.

And NPR has been running a series that resonates for anyone whose got a pile of college tuition bills on the desk next to mom's Medicare paperwork.

Stark stuff, with no easy answers.

It would be nice to think that these pieces might launch a serious public policy discussion of the realities of old old age, the costs of end of life care and its impact on families. As Wolff points out:

I

n 1990, there were slightly more than 3 million Americans over the age of 85. Now there are almost 6 million. By 2050 there will be 19 million—approaching 5 percent of the population.

But we're not counting on it.

Remember the first time you heard you'd need to have a million dollars to retire?

I do. I thought: You have got to be kidding me.

Then I thought: How is this going to work? We gajillion baby boomers can't all become millionaires can we?

Of course not.

They were talking about The Number, the title of a book by Lee Eisenberg, and the theory that you had to have enough of an investment portfolio to pull out a certain percentage each year--ye old conventional wisdom says it should be four percent.

The Number varies from individual to individual of course, depending on where and how you want to live in retirement. But the idea is that, once you hit The Number, you can relax; you won't be eating cat food when you're 80, or at least you'll be able to afford the Fancy Feast.

The problem for most of us over the past decade is that, even if you followed all the financial advice: maxxed out the 401K, contributed to a Roth, got yourself a diversified portfolio, just when you thought you might get there, 2008 happens. Or Jamie Dimon rolls the dice. What are you supposed to do when your quarterly contribution to your 401K is equal to half of the losses for the same quarter?

We think about this a lot, of course, but New York Times columnist Joe Nocera put the topic into the ether recently with his column entitled, My Faith-Based Retirement.
It's gotten a lot of responses online, including this one from Trudy Lieberman, at Columbia Journalism Review.

If a New York Times columnist who's been covering business and finance for decades has a 401K that's "in tatters," what chance do the rest of us have?

And if you think things have been cleaned up on Wall Street, then you haven't been watching Frontline lately.

Much of the investment advice found on the web and in newspapers is laughable, and it doesn't help that the conventional wisdom is often wrong.

Even "playing it safe" is a losing game these days. As this post from Vanguard blog points out, the low interest rates, which the Fed has promised to keep intact until the end of 2014, are costing us all, particularly the elderly.

One visible cost is the price paid by savers, the proverbial “sacrificial lambs” of ZIRP. Since peaking at $1.4 trillion in August 2008, the annual rate of personal interest income has declined by more than $400 billion*, as the yields on short-term bond funds, money market funds, and bank CDs have plummeted. This translates into a decline of nearly $1,000 in disposable personal income per person, although the lost interest mostly impacts older Americans. The modest economic growth the nation has experienced since 2008 has come, to some extent, at the price of a negative real rate of return for savers—0% interest rates minus an annual inflation rate of 2% to 3%.

And your million? Guess what, now you need two! A major reason: the cost of health care. Fidelity estimates that the average 65-year-old couple who retired in 2010 will need more than $250,000 to cover health care costs.

A friend noted to me recently that she had no idea how her retirement money was really invested; she just kept putting the money into the 401K. The fact is that, even in the best of times, not too many of us are qualified to manage a six-figure portfolio, and the consequences are beginning to emerge.

Boston College Center for Retirement Research has created the National Retirement Risk Index, which shows that about half of the babyboomers don't have enough to maintain their lifestyle in retirement.

My money guy is more optimistic--he points that markets go up and markets go down, but over time, you need to stay in stocks. But as we've all heard, past performance does not guarantee future returns, and a pessimist might point out that the next 50 years are shaping up to be very different from the past 50. Where are the investment books on: "How to Invest When Wackos in Congress Hold the Economy Hostage So They Can Take Down the President"? Or: "Tips for a Portfolio that Will Keep Growing When Sea Levels are Rising, Tornadoes are Raging and There's a Hundred Year Flood Everywhere Every Year"?

So what are we supposed to do--just give up on the Number, or invest in a Bob-o-pedic, stash the money under, it and hope for the best? I wish I knew.

And I think there are a lot of me's out there.

What's your real-world retirement strategy? Share
it on the Fiftyshift Facebook page.

A friend emailed me this post from Glamour Magazine that lists all the things you should know by your 30's. (I see there is no mention of dental care or the Spanx-vs.- Flexees debate in this list. Those were the days.)

Then she asked: what are the 50 things you should know by your 50's?

Damned if I know. I'm almost 60 and many days, it feels like I haven't learned a thing.

So I did what any other lazy social-media-savvy blogger would do. I "crowdsourced" the topic with my friends on Facebook. This was a win-win, because it turns out they are way smarter than me.

What do you think people ought to know by the age of 50? What have you learned? Share
it on the Fiftyshift Facebook page.

One of the biggest issues facing graduating seniors these days is just how they'll manage the debt they've accumulated over the previous four years. It's quite a chunk of change for a lot of students. According to The Project on Student Debt, the average 2010 college graduate left school with more than $25,000 in loan debt.

That figure is slightly higher in New England, because of the large number of private liberal arts colleges and the higher cost of public higher education, says Kevin Fudge, an advisor for American Student Assistance, a Boston non profit that helps students and alumni manage debt. You can check out the average debt at Massachusetts colleges here.

How'd we get here? It's partly the higher than inflation cost increases year after year; my students don't believe it when I tell them what I paid for a semester at UMass in the 1970's. But it's also the way aid is distributed.

It's a bittersweet time if your offspring are entering their final semester of college. Sweet, because the end of tuition checks is in sight. Bitter, because your daughter's entering a sketchy employment situation and you have turned her bedroom into your yoga studio and now you may have to give it back. This spring I teach my Launchpad Workshop for graduating seniors in my program at UMass, and here are a few tips I'll be sharing.

"Privacy is highly overrated," a student pronounced after class one day last semester; she was following up on a discussion about the professional costs of exposing oneself too much online.

My first response was: how would you even know it's overrated? You've never experienced it. But when you're an old(er) person working with, and teaching about, technology you're always taking your own temperature. Was she right? Is it passe, or even bad advice to a young person building a career to suggest that you hold back a piece of yourself from the great digital maw? Does privacy matter any more?

Years ago I was doing some last-minute Christmas shopping at a garden shop in Amherst when I came across an unusual loyalty program: For every $30 purchase, customers got a free Thich Nhat Hanh poem. This is not the kind of thing you’d see at, say, Banana Republic, and the cynic in me loved it. It’s kind of rich, right? There’s the irony of spending thirty bucks to get a quote about mindfulness. Only in western Mass., kids! Plus, Zen master has a Facebook page. How Zen can that be? I could go on all day.

Where would we be without Mehmet Oz? In this month's AARP magazine, he's got a piece called "24 Hours to a Longer Life." It's a day that begins with yoga, ends with lights out at 10 p.m., and includes a few hits of astragalus at 3:30 p.m. Hey, I can do that.

Go figure: the world is going to hell, and baby boomers will read, pay or do anything to stay in it just a leeeettle bit longer.

What if we transferred a little of that energy into preserving the place for our grandchildren and their kids? After all, when was the last time you said to yourself, "Hmmm, wonder how wonderful it's going to be around here in 2050"?

Let me get this straight. I have to pass through the Christmas decorations aisle to buy my Thanksgiving turkey. I'm supposed to clean my house like a white tornado and organize a re-enactment of the invasion of Normandy plan, shop, and cook a meal for 14 people, clean up after this meal, dispose of a puppy-sized turkey carcass, and then, after having barely slept off the Pinot, get up and head out before dawn for a deal on a new flatscreen?

Are you kidding me? Who comes up with this stuff?

We tend to fall in and out of like with magazines, but I remain in love with, (and pay for), New York magazine for a lot of reasons, the latest of which is its cover story on the creation of Ms. Magazine in the 1970s.

If you came of age at that time, run, don't walk, to this oral history of the magazine and the accompanying reprints of articles.

It's startling to see how far we have come and how backwards we've gone in 40 years. It was a radical act at the time to announce publicly that you'd had an abortion, which was then mostly illegal. Today, abortion is a legal medical procedure undergone by about one third of American women under the age of 45. But what public (or private) figure would risk such an admission these days?

Have you lost your cooking mo? I have. I used to love to cook; now there's always something more interesting or important to do.

Time is one factor: weeknight commuting takes a lot out of you, and when there are no kids around to feed, a big meal seems like more labor than it's worth. Can you say Kentucky Fried Pizza Bell?

"That picture of you looks terrible," said my mother, a split second after a painfully long, over-the-phone process in which I finally managed to get her over to this blog.

"Yup, I know, ma," I replied. I took the picture myself, using my laptop in a Thai restaurant waiting for my friend Jackie to arrive for lunch. I shot six, picked one and sent it off. They wanted it then and I didn't have time for anything more than that. In the year that followed I had a lot of other things to do than pose for a picture, and when I had the time I looked terrible. What are you gonna do?

In the old days, if you were a writer, it didn't matter much what you looked like. In the social media age, everything matters what you look like.

It's perhaps fitting that Candice Bergen, whose career took off when she became a single mother in the sitcom "Murphy Brown," earned a second wind as Dr. Cuddy's nasty elderly mom on "House" last season. Baby boomers are moving on from child care to elder care, and she's surfing the zeitgeist with a delicious flair.

Dear Elizabeth Warren:

First, let me congratulate you on staying classy, even though you were passed over to head up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau you worked so hard to develop. You're being way nicer to the Big Boys than I would be.

My husband and I celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary this summer, and to honor the occasion, we are cleaning the house. You have to clean the house once every 25 years, whether it needs it or not.

You know what I'm talking about. A pretty big dig. Cellar. Closets. Pantry. Shed. The bins in the front hallway. (Bins. This is where the trouble begins.)

It's like an archeological excavation. Maybe you're familiar with the stuff classifications:

Hats off and a Kir Royale to all who are attending a college graduation this month. To the single moms, the single dads, the two-parent families, the blended families, the extended families, who schlepped, sacrificed, sent money, learned how to text, and somehow endured, we salute you.

Anyone who hasn't done it has little idea of what a miracle it is to get a kid through.

Lucky is the lady who is genuinely sad when her mother-in-law passes, and fortunate is the woman whose daughter-in-law can deliver a great eulogy.

The recent issue of Money Whys, the newsletter from Vanguard, the financial services company, Stan Hinden, 83, author of How to Retire Happy: The 12 Most Important Decisions You Must Make Before You Retire, talks about what he wishes he had done differently in his own retirement.

Hinden's advice: buy an annuity, budget better, and this: work until you are 70.

HGTV featured a show recently about how celebrities decorate their homes for Christmas, and I knew I was in trouble, first because I had no idea who these celebrities were (Brooke Burke: who she?), and second, because when I saw the pictures of said homes, I felt like I was looking at a decorating version of the rooms you see on those hoarding shows.

Raise your hand if you or a sibling got to work late or left early in the past month to care for an elderly parent or chronically ill family member.

Add one point extra credit for each of the following extracurricular activities: filling a month’s worth of those little daily pill containers with the correct dosages of six different medications the first time. Paying all mom’s bills without overdrawing the account. Buying the right size and weight elastic socks at Walgreen’s. “Taking away” the car keys from mom or dad.

November is National Family Caregivers Month, and, if it is as successful as National Breast Cancer Awareness Month in focusing attention on the issues facing the nation’s mostly female 50 million family caregivers, this will be a very good thing.

I was talking with my older sister Heidi, who has raised four children, now in their 30s, about cooking one day; we figured that between the two of us, we had shopped for, prepared and cleaned up after at least 10,000 meals.

1. It's cheaper than a cherry red Porsche, but it doesn't attract younger women (in fact, just the opposite). Plus, it plows the driveway. (If you buy the bucketloader attachment.)

2. You can resell it for what you paid for it. This is because other men are crazy enough to pay big money for a 30-year-old piece of equipment. My husband sold his old John Deere MT to a guy from Connecticut for exactly what he paid for it 10 years earlier. This guy is using it for a lawn ornament.

3. It's not booze or drugs. And in some situations, it may be tax deductible.

4. Come the revolution, you'll be able to grow your own food big time and drag street trees to your yard and burn them in your fireplace. The ending of The Road would have been a lot different if this guy had had a tractor.

5. Cheer up, it could be a steamshovel.

A hat tip to my husband, TractorByNet and Steve Miller, who produced this cartoon at Xtranormal.com.

This past Labor Day weekend, I attended a special cookout; it was a reunion of fellow UMass alumni from the 1970s, most of whom were returning to Amherst to bring their own kids to college.

The young people included some first-year students, many from out of state, who were excited to be at UMass; the oldsters were a mix of former student government and campus media types. As undergrads, we had waged love and war upstairs at the Student Union at a frothy time: the Vietnam war was winding down, the women’s movement was flourishing, and Watergate was inspiring a lot of young people to get into journalism.

It was a joy to be with both generations - there were even a few who I know now, as a teacher at UMass. And so it was a kick in the head for these parents to get up the next morning (heads recovering from too much good wine) to read the Boston Globe story that lamented the paucity of 4.0 students in this year’s entering class.

I was struck reading a series of blog posts on a nursing home website recently, where a writer noted that: "caregiving is a blessing."

Well, maybe, at times. But let's face it. For most, the word "blessing" would not come to mind. For many working women in their 40s and 50s who thought they were done with diapers, managing someone else's medications, and chauffeuring a small, whiny person to expensive appointments, caring for elderly parents sometimes brings this scene to mind:

By B.J. Roche

One afternoon last week I logged into my Facebook page to find an ever-growing online list of heartfelt tributes to George Parks, the much-loved director of the UMass Marching Band who died of a heart attack at age 57 while en route to the University of Michigan for a big game. The posts ran the gamut from fellow UMass alums from the 1970s to current students.

Just below that was an update from my niece that included some absolutely breathtaking 4D in utero photos of my late brother Tim's first grandson, who should be arriving next month.

The thread pretty much summed up the way Facebook, which started out as a college student's game, has changed how we middle-aged women connect, across the generations, as well as with one other. (I promptly e-mailed the photos to my 85-year-old mother, who has more friends than I do.)