On a recent Sunday night I returned from a trip and noticed that the customary sparkle in my wife's eyes had been replaced by sadness. “I have bad news,” she said, putting an arm around me. “Cordell is gone. Killed in a car accident.”

My mother is in a nursing home and the doctor just gave her six months to live. But when he found out she couldn't pay her bill, he gave her another year. Last night after spending some time with her, the thought hit me: If I stay in peak physical condition, I will live long enough to be a drain on the medical system. And so I have uncovered three ways to ensure this does not happen.

Jeff is our youngest child, a big tough stylish kid, handsome and strong, the teenager all the little kids love and the kind girls phone to discuss math problems with (or at least that's what they tell us when they finally get past our customer service department). His laugh was enough to bring the house down when he was a boy, but that contagious laugh began to vanish by the time he turned 12 and was completely extinct by his 13th birthday. It's a horrible thing to watch someone view life wearing the glasses of a teenager, trading in joy because it isn't so cool.
Our kids have always laughed a lot, partly because they got their sense of humour from my wife's side of the family, whose motto is this: “It's all funny until someone gets hurt. Then it's hilarious!”

Though I am only 46, my hair has begun to vanish. I do not have trouble growing hair. But location is everything with hair. I am like a struggling oil company. I have great production, but poor distribution.
If you're one of those guys who still has his original hair, go ahead and laugh. But if you're experiencing a recession yourself, if you've been cluttering pillows and clogging drains, if you've stopped combing and started rearranging, you'll be happy to know that there is hope. I can't think of anything hopeful at the moment, but give me some time and I'll think of something. While I do, let's look at some ways in which the scientific community, working hand-in-hand with laboratory rats, has shown us just how bleak the picture really is.

It began in March with a phone call home. “I've got great news,” I told my wife. Then I read from the front page of the newspaper: “The gene that causes Huntington's disease has been discovered after a decade-long search, sparking hope a cure can be found for the deadly neurological disorder.” Ramona listened, her heart pounding.
As a young teen she learned that Huntington's was in her family and there was a 50-50 chance she would eventually die from it. During the next 20 years, she watched three siblings — all in their 30s — contract the disease, one making the slow and humiliating journey to a nursing home.