Helping Yourself Grow Old: Things I Said To Myself When I Was Almost Ninety

Do you have a plan, a strategy for the final years of your life? A dream of what you want to be in your old age?

Finding no guidebook, Frances Fuller decided that she must figure out for herself how to live wisely through the puzzles and possibilities of aging, and while she learned she wrote. The result is these thirty-eight personal essays, most of them resolves, promises she is making to herself and her family. In them she deals with such issues as grief, loneliness, physical limitations, fears, duties, and with the significance of her own life story. Guided always by her Christian faith, she tries to make sense of her own past and to understand her responsibility to younger generations.

In the process she shares her daily life, enriched with memories from her fascinating experiences. Her stories and her voice--fresh, honest, irresistible--keep the reader eager for more.

Her questions are universal. Her answers create a map through the challenging terrain of old age.

Frances Fuller writes out of the overflow of a long, varied life. A child of the depression, she has earned degrees in journalism, English and religious education, traveled extensively, built a publishing house in the Middle East, survived several wars, and written numerous books (some published only in Arabic), including the triple award-winning In Borrowed Houses. Meanwhile, she was a wife for 63 years, a Bible teacher, and public speaker while raising three sons and two daughters. Her ten grandchildren are her hope for the world.

She wrote the final chapter of this book on her ninetieth birthday.