Liminal Living vs The Impossible Dream

[A. Casolani, 16th century]

We are househunting.

Will our new place be a relatively new condo with no exterior maintenance, plenty of storage, an open floor plan, lots of bathrooms, and no stairs?

Will it be a city rowhouse that is older than we are, has arches and built-in cabinets and red oak plank floors, and is walking distance from a university, bookstores, and libraries?

Whatever we dream of, will our retirement income be sufficient for both the house and, say, groceries?

And will we still be able to live in it when we're crippled, incontinent, and demented?

I've been asking myself that last question with every house I inspect, which is probably why I've been getting more and more depressed. Medieval folk kept cheerfulness at bay by contemplating skulls. An afternoon of looking at potential retirement homes, I've found, also works.

Last week I blogged about our liminal lodging - the apartment we've rented for a few months to tide us over until we find our, um, final resting place. (Snap out of it, LaVonne!) This morning I had one of those blindingly obvious insights that you sensible people have understood all along: Life itself is liminal.

As I mentioned last week, it's good to put a threshold between one phase of life and another. Living in our  rented apartment is allowing us to do that. But I'm deluding myself if I think our next house is going to be permanent - just as suitable to our life in 30 years, when we're 95 and 96, as it is to our life today. I'm glad I figured that out, because I'm not all that excited by houses that would presumably appeal to nonagenarians.

In my search for the permanently perfect place, I've been driving my realtor to distraction ("I keep getting mixed messages from you," she says, and then five minutes later she says, "But you have such specific requirements"). Bless her, she persists in spite of me. She's even cheerful, or at least pleasantly resigned.

However, she did tell me about a friend of hers who made himself miserable for years because he wanted so badly to give up smoking and thereby live forever, and he simply couldn't do it. At age 42, having stopped to help a stranded motorist, he was struck and killed by a drunk driver.

Medicare Part D: Another year, another huge price increase

I signed up for Medicare last month. In addition to standard Medicare, I added Part D, the prescription drug benefit. My 2013  costs, if they had covered the entire year, would have come to $529 for insurance and $330 for prescription copays.

Today's mail brought the rates for 2014. The insurance premium has increased to $650, or by about 23%. Copays have also increased, to $616, or by nearly 87%. The total increase - assuming I won't need any additional medications - comes to 47%.

I was not happy when President Bush proposed and AARP supported Medicare Part D, the prescription drug benefit. The idea of insuring seniors' drugs was good. The resulting law, which specifically forbids the federal government from negotiating prices with pharmaceutical companies, was insane.

Well, "insane" is putting a good face on it. The financiers who supported the companies who bought the politicians who voted for the law were by no means insane. They were lining their own pockets, never mind the rest of us.

It's obvious, isn't it? If the government gives away money without limits and accountability, retail prices rise, insurance premiums rise, and consumers end up paying as much (or more) out-of-pocket than before the government stepped in.

Want proof? Take a look at this chart from the Kaiser Family Foundation. Notice that the U.S. government spends about as much of its GDP on healthcare as other developed countries (without, however, insuring everybody, as the other countries do). Notice that, unlike citizens of other countries, U.S. citizens spend a whopping amount in addition to what the government spends. The difference? Those other countries put strict limits on what pharmaceutical companies and other medical suppliers can charge.

Some Americans suggest that the government should just stop subsidizing things like health care and education. That doesn't make sense unless you think that only rich people should have access to schools and hospitals. But it makes more sense than subsidizing something without putting a ceiling on what the lucky recipients can charge for their goods and services.

I am going to look for a different Medicare Part D insurance company. I don't expect to find one that's much better, however, until our lawmakers learn to say Yes to middle-class and disadvantaged people and a loud, resounding No! to rich institutions and individuals who want to get even richer at our expense.

On becoming a senior citizen: morning-after thoughts

[A toast to a new era]

Yesterday I turned 65.
Twelve days ago my Medicare insurance (parts A, B, D, and supplemental) took effect. Any day now my RTA Reduced Fare Permit will arrive in the mail. On Friday my husband, who is also 65, will be officially retired from the job he held for 28 years.

It feels like adolescence all over again, but with less energy.
Like our three teen-aged grandchildren, we are making big decisions that will affect the rest of our lives. Should we stay in our familiar environment or move to a different part of the country? Our granddaughters have opted to move: Katie is beginning college nearly 2000 miles from home, Susan is considering colleges all over the country. We've been involved in a wide variety of work and extracurricular activities: is it time to refocus and choose the one(s) that interest us most? Our grandson Chris, about to start high school, is making similar choices.

It also feels like being two years old, but with less cuteness.
Our grandson Max, who is impossibly cute and universally adored, still has daily trials that seem a lot like ours. How do we deal with the frustration of knowing what we want to do but not being able to do it? Do we want to be independent ("Baby self!"), or do we want the security of nearby family ("Mommy come!")? The answer, of course, is both, and when we can't have both at once, we might fuss just a little.

Or is it more like a midlife crisis, but with fewer distractions?
Our middle-aged children's lives are in as much transition as ours. One daughter has recently gone back to work after a 16-year hiatus, and it won't be long before her nest is empty. The other daughter has, in only three years, become a tenured professor, gotten married, had a baby, and bought her first house. One son-in-law's company and the other son-in-law's industry are undergoing major changes. And they're all starting to think about how to help their aging parents make good decisions ("Move closer to us!" "Don't buy a house with stairs!").

Well, as C.S. Lewis wrote in an entirely different context,

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.

--Mere Christianity

Note to self when, overwhelmed by change, I feel like I'm banging my head against a wall: maybe I'm just banging my beak against a permeable shell.

J. Alfred Prufrock contemplates retirement

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.
 T.S. Eliot 

Wednesday is my husband's last day at the office.
We've been looking forward to this next phase of our lives for a long time. For some 25 years we've been sending a large percentage of our modest incomes to retirement accounts. We joke that our retirement plan is to live on so little that we won't miss it when it's gone.

For the last several months we've been crunching the numbers. When exactly should he retire? Would a reallocation of our retirement resources make them last longer? Which of our two highly professional, fee-based, but disagreeing financial advisers should we follow? When should we take Social Security? When can we start getting Medicare benefits? Which work-based health-insurance plan should we sign up for in order to stay covered until Medicare kicks in? Which of the many Medicare supplemental insurance plans is best? Which of the many insurance companies offering such plans is most likely to stay solvent and keep its rates low? Which Medicare Part D prescription drug plan will best suit our needs?

We've also been looking at lifestyle questions. Should we stay in the place that has been home for 25 years, or should we move to be closer to family? We know about living too far from our kids - 1100 miles from one daughter's family, 800 miles from the other's - but is it possible to live too close? If we move, how do we find good realtors, here and there? What do we need to do to get our place ready to sell? We already live in a townhouse - should we downsize even further? When thinking about a place to live, what factors are most important to us? Will we need a place without stairs?

And then there's the question everybody asks: What will you do in retirement?

"First," my husband says, "I'm going to clean the garage." I hope he's not joking.