“Most elders are betting the farm.” This sentiment comes from Leonard Raymond, executive director of HOME (Home Owners Options for Massachusetts Elders). It expresses the long considered and well informed opinion of someone who feels strongly that many home equity loans in general, and reverse mortgages in particular, serve elder citizens badly.

Raymond’s Boston-based nonprofit agency has worked with elders over the past 20 years, helping them find useful alternatives to loans against the value of their home. Though he does not have exact figures, he estimates the number of Massachusetts elders taking home equity loans annually is in the thousands. That is reason for regret because undoubtedly many will come to financial grief.

“We are very much into equity conservation,” Raymond assures this inquirer, and he considers loans a last resort. In his view, “If you have to leave your home, it’s better to leave with cash than without.”

Open-ended reverse mortgages are very expensive, far more so than ordinary mortgages, says this expert. The application fees, closing costs, insurance, compounding interest, and monthly servicing fees involved in such deals can beggar elders, if they do not take care.

An attractive alternative for some elders might be “term reverse mortgages.” These devices feature a fixed indebtedness limit, usually no more than two-thirds of the property’s value. According to HOME, they also have “much lower closing costs, and no mortgage insurance premiums or service fees.”

Many elders take out open-ended reverse mortgages to make home repairs, unaware that there are alternative sources of financing. The city of Boston, for example, makes funds available for this purpose, as do some other municipalities. Though this money is steered primarily toward low-income homeowners, the income ceilings do rise over time, making more and more people eligible.

Another remedy for those needing help is property tax relief. Yet astonishingly few elders avail themselves of this benefit. In Massachusetts, Raymond reports, only 15 percent of those who are eligible take advantage of it. In Boston, only an astounding 7 of the 18,400 homeowners over age 65 have had their property taxes deferred.  They thus pass up a better deal than reverse mortgages can provide.

AARP has an extensive web site with information about reverse mortgages, and that agency does caution elders about the need of counseling before they make decisions. Len Raymond, however, judges the AARP site deficient in several ways. “Equity depletion is not there,” he says, emphasizing again that, for most elders, their home is their main financial asset. To deplete its value is dangerous.

And, according to him, most of the counseling, even for federally supported loans, takes place over the telephone, rather than in people’s homes. Homeowners need to consider seriously many factors before they can make sound fiscal decisions about their residences. It is not enough to have a single brief conversation with someone, no matter how well informed that person may be.

Ideally, financial planning needs to be part of a remainder-of-life planning process, Raymond suggests. Elders should take a long-term perspective that envisions the changes that will inevitably take place in their lives. In view of increased longevity, we must plan for the long haul.

With these cautions in mind, you can still find valuable some of the information on the AARP website: www.aarp.org/revmort-basics. I found the fact sheet included here helpful for beginning investigation. However, again, there is no substitute for talking with impartial knowledgeable people who are looking out for your good.

In writing this column in response to a reader’s request, I had envisioned simply providing technical information about reverse home equity mortgages. But it now seems that I can best serve readers by recommending that they contact HOME. The number of this Boston nonprofit is 1 (800) 583-5337. Over a 21-year period, this agency has worked with almost 24 thousand households and without charging fees.

This is a crucial time for many older homeowners. According to recent report, the indebtedness of Americans over age 75 has quadrupled of late. Foreclosures of property owned by elders have increased at an alarming rate. HOME, only one agency, is currently handling 80 such cases.

The approach of this agency can be summed up thus: “Loans are a last resort and should be needs oriented, consumer friendly, should provide an equity reserve for future contingencies, and should be informed by a long term planning process.”

Many new corporations have recently sprung up that take as their sole business the selling of home equity loans. Some of these businesses are presumably the targets of Raymond’s statement: “A lot of for-profit entities would like us to disappear.”

Scams threaten to rob us older homeowners of our greatest financial security. There are all sorts of slick operators at work who will not scruple to get us to act fast and disastrously, unless we take precautions. My own consciousness has been raised by contact with HOME, reason enough for my recommendation above.

Richard Griffin

Two keepsakes related to the recent 60th anniversary of D-Day have emerged from our family files and stir further reflection.

The first is a dinner menu from Longwood Towers in Brookline, where my father-in-law, Roger Keane, was general manager from 1928 to 1963. That imposing chateau-like structure served in those days as a full-service hotel as well as a long-term residence.

The dining room’s bill of fare for Tuesday, June 6, 1944 bore the heading “D-Day,” indicating that both Roger and the printing company had reacted quickly to breaking events.

The menu featured: Broiled Eastern Salmon, New Peas; Fried Smelts, Corn Relish; Yankee Pot Roast; Creamed Chicken Short-Cake; Ham and Eggs, Country Style; Broiled Spring Lamb Chop; Half Young Chicken Broiled to order.”

Austere items like smelts and ham and eggs may have been designed to please the New England palate; more probably, though, they reflected an effort to cope with the restrictions of wartime rationing.

The prices for the complete dinners featuring the dishes listed above ranged from $1.50 to $1.80. If you preferred the so-called Plate Dinner, it would cost you 25 cents less, in all instances. With a nice touch, the Shredded Cabbage and Carrot Salad, was bestowed the anticipated title “Victory Dressing.”

Desserts included Hot Apple Pie, Peach Ice Cream, and Orange Layer Cake. The menu on this patriotic occasion ended with Demi Tasse, perhaps as an unconscious tribute to the land where allied forces were even then establishing an heroic beachhead.

That evening on the east coast of the United States was not yet the time for festive and celebrative moods. Maybe the serving of wine would thus have been inappropriate but, in any event, there was no wine list on the tables and patrons were almost never observed ordering bottles or even glasses of bubbly or flatter vintages. That amenity would have to await the aftermath of WWII.

In fine print just below notice of the Massachusetts Old Age Tax 5% came assurance of the prices being in accordance with regulations of the O. P. A. –  –  the office of wartime price controls, administered then by the now 96-year-old John Kenneth Galbraith.

The second of our keepsakes is a pocket-sized French Phrase Book, marked Restricted, and dated September 28, 1943. It was issued by the War Department and intended for use by military personnel who would come into France and other countries where the 52 million French speakers lived.

Most of the linguistic entries in the paperback’s 117 pages are actually single words or brief phrases. They largely envision situations in which American soldiers would be arriving as invaders, though friendly ones allied with European governments in exile.

Each English entry is followed by a transliteration that gives an idea of how to pronounce the French word or phrase. “I am hungry,” for instance, is described as “jay FANG.” “Get a bandage” is rendered as “ah-lay shayr-shay ung pahnss-MAHNG.”

Whether any native French speaker would understand these renderings is a question that lies outside the phrase book’s scope. However, the unknown War Department author hedges his bets: “If the person you are speaking to knows how to read, you can point to the question in French and ask him to point to the answer.”

It would be interesting to discover adventures that allied soldiers had with this simple language guide. No word came down from my wife’s uncle Paul Berrigan who was a colonel in the Army Corps of Engineers and landed in Normandy two days after June 6, 1944. Doubtless this bridge-building West Pointer constructed linguistic bridges to French speakers but we have few details.

Other families surely could extract more dramatic trophies from their attics than our menu and phrase book. That they were saved suggests, however, the value put on them by family members. Looking over them has brought me the pleasure of recalling world-reshaping events from my teenage years.

On the front cover of the little book a name jumps out at me: G. C. Marshall, Chief of Staff, the person who must have authorized many publications at that time. But his name also evokes the great plan that would reconstruct Europe once the war was over.

The menu brings back a simpler time when we could count our salaries and expenditures on our hands. The same prices charged by distinguished restaurants back then must now be multiplied by a factor of 15 or 20, if not more. It’s all relative, of course, but the simpler arithmetic does point to a less complicated time, even with a monstrous war raging across much of the world.

As I never tire of repeating, change is one of the large factors that make later life so adventurous internally. We current elders have lived through and will continue to live through astonishing changes that often leave us reeling, sometimes with dismay, often with heady excitement.

Richard Griffin

Of Father Robert Bullock it is told that many Jewish residents of Sharon, Massachusetts called him Rabbi. This was a sign of deep respect for this Catholic pastor of many years in that town.

It also serves as one indication of the pioneering work that Father Bullock had done to bring Catholic and Jewish communities closer together in mutual understanding and love. His time as Catholic chaplain at Brandeis University, his 26 years of service in Sharon where many residents are Jewish, and his involvement with Facing History, the organization dedicated to educating students and others about the Holocaust, all qualify as features of that work.

Perhaps Father Bullock’s work in this area was ironically prefigured back in 1936 when he was a 7-year-old altar boy at Sacred Heart Church in Newton Center. That is when Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, came to visit that Newton parish and, while there, reached out his hand to Bob and gave him a blessing. Who could have predicted that the young boy and the future pope would have such contrasting histories with regard to the Jewish community?

Another large area in which Father Bullock distinguished himself was leadership in the profoundly troubled Archdiocese of Boston. He was one of the first priests to speak out about the clericalism that infected ecclesiastical life in Boston and elsewhere. When the media looked for analysis of what ailed the Catholic Church, they found in Father Bullock a trustworthy spokesman.

What made him so reliable was the selflessness with which he analyzed issues. Paradoxically, perhaps, this quality freed him to include himself among the blameworthy for not having spoken out earlier about his fellow priests who were guilty of sexual abuse. At the same time, he rejected the way that the official church sometimes acted against priests without due regard for their rights.

Perhaps another secret of Robert Bullock’s inner freedom came from his rejection of ambition. I love the old story, recounted by veteran television news broadcaster David Boeri, of Father Bullock’s meeting the famous community organizer Saul Alinsky on an airplane ride.

Alinsky reportedly asked him which he wanted to be, a priest or a bishop. When the young priest asked Alinsky what he meant, the organizer answered “You need to decide now because it makes all the difference what path you take.”

Still, some of us would have liked to see our friend Bob have a position of greater leadership in the church, even if he had to become a bishop to achieve it. We think that it might have made for a much better church than what we have had.

My friendship with Bob began 61 years ago this September. Schoolboys together, we entered the ninth grade at St. Sebastian’s Country Day School, as it was then called. Located in Newton on Nonantum Hill, this school was weaker than it should have been academically in the first years of its existence, but it forged friendships that have lasted till death.

As a young man, Bob showed many of the qualities that would make him outstanding as a priest and a thoroughly devoted pastor. I remember him as committed to his studies, active in sports (notably on the same baseball team with me) and full of grace and humor in his social relations with friends of both genders. Though he was responsive to religion in high school, his vocation to the priesthood did not take full shape until he completed his education at Boston College.

His education, however, was to continue throughout his lifetime. He remained a learner always, keeping up with the latest biblical and theological scholarship and taking an active interest in the thinking of leading intellectuals in secular fields.

What I especially admired was the way my friend grew all through the years of his ministry. The many trials he faced seemed to make him stronger, someone whom others would wish to consult on personal issues. His courage in speaking out against authority, leading to the resignation of the cardinal archbishop, marked Bob as a leader ready to take criticism for his actions. Bob showed some of the advantages brought by a lengthy life.

When you live long enough, you experience the death of many friends, as I am discovering. Bob’s loss is one that hits me with special force. He was easy to like, admire, love. I thought he would be with us for much longer because of his apparently strong body and vibrant spirit.

But, once again, growing in years has brought me and others personal loss. The mystery of suffering, physical decline, and death surprises us once again. No more than anyone else do I have an answer to this mystery, no answer other than which my faith community has handed down to me.

Bob received much from that faith community and gave much back. I like to think that his life, though now lost to earthly appearance, will continue transformed.

Richard Griffin

Here’s some fast-breaking news of statuesque interest.

More than 50 people resident in my urban community have posed nude, or in some instances almost nude, for a new calendar that will cover the academic year that starts in September 2004.

Several of those seen without notable clothes are citizens prominent outside their home town, notably the erstwhile gubernatorial candidate Robert Reich and the husband/wife authors Anne Bernays and Justin Kaplan.

Though news of this event has not shaken the burghers of my home town, it has provided considerable amusement to some others from more staid communities.

A prominent resident of Boston’s Beacon Hill, Smoki Bacon, for instance, when she heard about the publication said about the Kaplans: “At their age, they are entitled to do anything they want.” My friend Smoki’s spouse Dick Concannon added: “With the advent of Bush the elder jumping out of a plane, who says seniors cannot show their bodies?”

Neither of these Bostonians expressed any envy of the chosen 50. And, when I showed the calendar to members of El Grupo – my circle of special friends who share a meal each week – they all perused the calendar with amusement but greeted with horror any prospect of themselves posing.

I called my friend Justin Kaplan, whom I respect for many reasons. Among them, I think especially of his fine literary work on Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, and the entertaining memoir that he co-authored with his wife Anne Bernays.

In contacting Kaplan and asking about his motivation for posing without covers in the stacks of my favorite bookstore, I received a surprise. Others had suggested that he wanted to display the septuagenarian body proudly and without shame.

According to this surmise, which I bought into, he was demonstrating how even in advanced age the human body retains its splendor and that only a false modesty would have made him refuse the invitation to pose clotheslessly.

This distinguished writer surprised me, however, by rejecting noble motivation and answering: “We were drugged.” So much for my theories.

When pressed for more motivation for him and his wife posing, Kaplan replied lightheartedly: “If anyone is offended or scandalized, the hell with them.”

Despite the celebrity status of some of the poseurs, you won’t find your favorite columnist among the nudes anytime soon. Fortunately I was not judged distinguished enough to be asked.

In the abstract I would have welcomed the opportunity. After all, I serve as a champion of all things older and would have felt it an honor to display the athletic 75-year-old body tout nu, as the French say. In the concrete, however, it was too cold for me to have disrobed last winter when the show-all photos were taken.

Even if the photographer had allowed me to use a book as a fig leaf, as Kaplan did with his own memoir, or the studied placement of her arms, as Bernays did, I would have rejected this photo op. Revealing myself in words is ample enough self-disclosure for this proper Greater Bostonian.

I would like to have asked Robert Reich his motivation for posing. This 58-year-old took a half-way approach, only baring it all behind an amply stocked fruit basket that concealed his entire lower-mid section. Though known as a candidate who is candid with voters, his physical candidness apparently has limits. Perhaps he wants to run for office again.

Quite a few of these nudists posed in groups of friends or fellow workers. That meant they revealed their bodily selves to others even before the calendar hit the newsstands. Given the delays involved in professional photography, that must have involved considerable time spent together nude. For me that would have provided more opportunity to get to know my associates than I needed.

I wonder how many of the disrobed would agree with this shocking conviction of mine: Most people look a whole lot better with clothes on.

Yes, there are exceptions – Michelangelo’s David comes to mind, as do many Venuses– but for most of us, clothes, if they do not exactly make the Man or the Woman, go far to improve our appearance.

I think it significant that Justin Kaplan has not seen the calendar and does not want to. We, its purchasers, look at it with a certain wonder and curiosity to see to what extent others, stripped bare, look like us, but I remain thankful for the law that prohibits us from walking down the street in the altogether.

Yes, let me again express my appreciation of God’s work in devising the human body, and allow me to endorse Shakespeare “What a piece of work is a man,” but when it comes right down to it I prefer to see my neighbors adorned with clothing.

Richard Griffin

“Now I have another son.”  These are the words spoken by the mother of one partner in a recent wedding of two gay men.

Knowing that she is a Catholic, I was impressed with the way she overcame whatever feelings of disapproval she had for gay marriage. She presumably overcame those feelings out of love for her son and affection for his partner.

If she felt mixed about the wedding, so did I. As a guest of the two men, I entered into the joy that my friends Tony and Jim (as I will call them) experienced that day. And yet, I also felt misgivings about the new public policy that gives the title marriage to persons of the same gender.

The joy was genuine because I feel glad about my two friends finding such lasting pleasure in one another’s company. Obviously their love is genuine and has already stood the test of time. They should have the social benefits that come with a union recognized by the state, the way heterosexual couples have for a long time.

My sticking point centers on the word “marriage.” I believe that the word expresses something unique, namely the union between people of different genders. My view is that the joining of men and women in the marital bond differs from same sex unions because the sexes are different from one another.

To me, words are important and marriage signifies something that cannot properly be given to same sex unions because it already belongs to different sex unions.

In holding this view, I realize this puts me with the older part of the American population. Polls show that some 60 percent of people over age 65 oppose legalizing gay marriage while 70 percent of people under 30 approve of it. Does that mean that we elders have a special wisdom or that we are bogged down in outmoded ideas?

I admit feeling some concern for being out of touch with the views of young people. On some other issues, I am glad to be with them and that seems to me a sign of my own vitality.

On this issue, however, I differ from the large majority of young Americans. At a recent lunch with college students, I asked a group sitting near me how they felt. Unanimously they all endorsed gay marriage. I believe that they have not thought deeply enough about the question. And some of them may not believe in heterosexual marriage.

Richard Griffin

The writer feels panic. Why? She is just about to reach her fiftieth birthday.

What a fate to discover you have passed out of your 40’s! It’s enough to make any sensible woman cry out to plastic surgeons for help. And that’s what this woman, Daphne Merkin, has been doing in a scene she evokes in her first sentence: while lying in bed, she peruses a book by one such surgeon explaining what he can do for someone desperate for a makeover.

If her article “Keeping the Forces of Decrepitude at Bay” in the New York Times Sunday Magazine of May 2nd is any indication, Daphne Merkin qualifies as a clever writer.  Full of post-modern pizzazz, this essay also provides pages of morose entertainment about aging.

The writer’s main theme details the horrors of advancing to mid-life. Here, in brief, is the way Merkin regards her future as it unfolds from 50: “All I can see in front of me is a decades-long campaign of vigilantly keeping the forces of decrepitude at bay as I totter forward over the next 15 years into first the demographic embrace of the ‘young-old …; then into the trembling clutches of the ‘old old’ (the over-75’s); and then, if the fates and my genes are so inclined, finally into the company of the ‘oldest old.’”

That’s all she can see ahead of her: decrepitude and membership in age categories that grow in undesirability. There is simply no light shining through these advances in years; she talks about them “in the spirit of defeat” rather than with a feeling of liberation.

No doubt Merkin’s article has reached a wide readership because it gives such modish expression to the malaise of contemporary life among the rich and famous. But I wonder why the Times chose to print an article that shows so little awareness of the creative possibilities now open to middle-aged Americans by reason of greater longevity. That the piece also displays such remarkably little wisdom about human life in general also distresses me.

She has narrowed the flourishing of human life to the appearance of her own body parts. Should you have failed to entrust yourself to the surgeon’s knife by age 50, you are destined to have the face of a hag, she says at one point.

She fears having taken action too late: “Ideally I should have been vigilantly proactive since about the age of 13. How have I let myself slip over the boundary into the dreaded category of the discernibly aging woman?”

The key word here is perhaps “discernibly.” If you have wealth and leisure, you can devote a great deal of effort to the surface you present to the world.

This approach reduces living to external appearance; one’s plastic surgeon looms much larger than any spiritual inspiration ever could. For this woman, eyelids, jowls, and jaw line emerge as the most important things in life.

Throughout Merkin’s writing there’s no mention of spirit. For her, life seems limited to the corpus, the body at progressive risk of something going wrong. She seems never to have heard of anyone growing in personal stature during the middle and later years.

You would never think there’s a world outside. Merkin does mention once the contrast between a “decadent makeover culture” and the war waged by terrorists “trying to figure out how to blast Western civilization off the map.” But this connection proves only a passing distraction from the real war, that against the aging self.

The domestic world is marginalized as well. Merkin mentions her 14-year-old daughter but she accords little significance to the joys and challenges of motherhood. She seems too centered on her own physical uplift to grant any value to this human role.

The main subject of her essay seems ultimately to be shaped by self-hatred. What a tragedy to have reached 50 years and now have nothing left but decline, degradation, and death! Her shrink does not seem much help: Merkin appears to be still discussing “the scars of her childhood” with this presumably high-priced therapist.

At the end of the essay Merkin has passed her surgical ordeal but the results do not impress anyone else as notable. However, she herself considers “a slight freshening of my expression, a less haggard look around the eyes, a greater definition about the jaw line, the general suggestion of a less worn-out contour” as worth the money and the pain.

This carefully crafted description of the outcome, with its underplayed bathetic estimate of the oh-so-subtle changes wrought in her face, suddenly makes me wonder if I (along with many other readers) have been had. Is Merkin serious or have we all been taken in by a master ironist?  Could we been treated to nothing but a satire on the follies of postmodern aspirations for immortality, doomed to defeat?

Richard Griffin

“If I ran AARP for one day,” was half the title of a talk I heard recently at the annual conference of the American Society on Aging. The second half was “Ken Dychtwald speaks out,” a reference to the dynamic middle-aged consultant who, for the past 25 years or so, has made a career of taking often iconoclastic positions on issues affecting older Americans.

Better known on the west coast than on the east, this crowd-pleasing speaker recognized long ago the difference that demographics would make in this country. Before most others in the field of business, Dychtwald foresaw how the forthcoming explosion in numbers of older people would transform American society.

On this occasion he confronted the 35 million member organization that dominates the field of elder advocacy. The size of the membership should be reduced, incidentally, by some 15 thousand, said to be the number who have recently resigned because AARP gave its support to Medicare legislation of dubious benefit to this nation’s elders and younger Americans also.

In his hard-hitting but diplomatic manifesto, Dychtwald began by professing great respect for AARP. “They command the intellectual marketplace,” said this entrepreneur as he also expressed admiration for its annual revenue of 650 million dollars.

If there was a central theme in Dychtwald’s five-point critique of AARP, it centered on the model of aging implicitly used by the organization. “We need a new map of aging,” he affirmed, with the year 78 as the marker rather than the current 65 or below. At this point in history we are growing old later, and loads of older adults are discarding the worn-out stereotypes that have defined aging.

Older people now need to reinvent themselves, taking advantage of the multiple chances they have to grasp hold of what really matters in life. We have to focus on human possibilities, an attitude that involves looking for what people can give instead of simply what they can take. There is something wrong with wealthy elders holding on to their riches, while so many children lack health care, effective schools, and other basic goods.

Secondly, Dychtwald says, “We have created the wrong model of maturity in this country.” Later life is not a time for simply taking and receiving. He goes further to claim of this model: “It is morally and ethically bankrupt.”  For elders to be watching 43 hours of television on average every week is a disgrace, because it means that by “goofing off,” they are betraying the purpose of living longer.

That purpose is to give something back to the society that has given them so much. AARP should redirect its energies away from getting more for older people and instead fix the problems of younger people and build the 21st century.

The work of Habitat in constructing homes for the poor stands out as a fine example of what can be done by older people, among others. Jimmy Carter, whom Dychtwald claims as a friend, has taken an active role as a builder, recognizing the value of service to others.

A third point: “Our health care system is wildly misaligned for an aging society.” The dominant model is wrong because it is based on acute care; we are not spending nearing enough on chronic diseases like Alzheimer’s that threaten to afflict many elders. Our medical schools do not teach geriatrics, with fewer than ten percent of graduates having taken a single course in the subject. Our communities need models of care that work, and the dying process needs to be deinstitutionalized.

In these and other areas of health care, we need leadership. The recent AARP-backed changes in Medicare did not fix this program. AARP could help older people learn that health care is a partnership and a shared responsibility between themselves and medical professionals.

Turning attention to the Boomer generation, Dychtwald bemoans their lack of financial planning. Twenty-five million members of this group have less than one thousand dollars in net assets, he says. Three-fourths of them have never had a conversation with their parents about wealth transfer. How can we prevent this next generation from a “financial train wreck,” he asks.

As to AARP’s future, Dychtwald would like to see an organizational transformation. It needs to tell the truth about its numbers involved in advocacy. AARP should admit that it is a special interest group and should reevaluate offering various discount programs.

The trouble is that AARP has become an empire and suffers no competition. “If it were a for-profit organization, it would probably be broken up at this point.”  “You are not stimulated,” Dychtwald says to AARP, “because you have no competition.”

In concluding, the speaker urges AARP to change. “Do something spectacular!” “Be a leader!” “This is the big one: a revolution greater than the industrial and technological revolutions of the last century.You have the leverage to do it.!”

Richard Griffin