or Bob Selig, 58, the summer of 1997 was about as bad as it gets. "My wife was suffering from ovarian cancer. Mom fell and broke her hip. Dad got double-pneumonia."

Selig, owner of a Palo Alto, Calif.-based company that makes boating instruments and auto computers, hated to leave his wife for even a few days. But he had no choice. His parents in Los Angeles, about 600 miles away, were helpless.

"I had all the responsibility," Selig says. "They lived alone. We had no relatives in Los Angeles. They'd outlived all their friends."

Everyone with aging parents lives in fear of the day mom or pop will desperately need help - perhaps for a very long time. Where do you look for help?

Selig flew to Los Angeles to arrange hip surgery for his mother, 85, and then to find a convalescent home for her recovery. Meanwhile, his mother could no longer care for Selig's 87-year-old father, a former college president and theater-chain executive suffering from early Alzheimer's disease. So Selig also had to find a live-in nurse's aide to care for him.

After that, without pausing for breath, Selig had to hustle back to Palo Alto to look after his wife, who needed cancer surgery and chemotherapy.

"I felt as if I were unraveling," he says. "There were times I would just break down and cry."

Today's old timers are from a tough generation. They came of age in the Depression, won a world war, and then rebuilt the country and the world. They fearlessly started their families at the same time - causing the population bubble known as baby boomers, those born in the post-war boom years.

They're now in their 70s and older, and falling prey to the traditional ravages of old age - heart disease, stroke, cancer and dementia.

What happens when they can no longer take care of themselves? Usually the burden falls on their boomer kids - whose first impulse often is to bring their ill parents into their own homes.

Such a seemingly generous move could be the wrong thing to do, however, especially when the parent is suffering from chronic disease or dementia.

Usually, it's the daughter who takes mom or dad in - typically, when she herself is about age 57, with a full-time job and her own grown children. The extra work of caregiving soon takes its toll, usually on the job or career. In about one case out of eight, the daughter winds up quitting her job completely to take care of mom or dad.

Furthermore, because of longer life spans, the burden lasts a good deal longer than it did in turn-of-the-century America. Before antibiotics, "pneumonia was the old person's friend," says Nancy Wexler, a Los Angeles-area geriatric care manager and author of Mama Can't Remember Anymore. "People would get sick, and suddenly, they were gone."

Today, adult children can easily spend more years taking care of their parents than their parents took care of them.

Some caregivers can become so burned out that they end up in the hospital themselves. In other instances, a kind of role reversal takes place when the daughter finds herself parenting her own parent - a traumatic experience for everyone. "But the biggest challenge is guilt," says Dr. Charles Wexler, a Los Angeles physician who works with his wife, Nancy, in her geriatric care management business.

"Children keep their parents well past the time they should have been placed someplace, and usually to the breaking point, and then someone like us will get a call. They can't stand it anymore; he is turning on the gas and leaving it on, smearing the wall with feces, wandering out, getting lost and being picked up by the police.

"And usually it gets to the point where a crisis happens and that gives them permission to do what they should have done a year ago - place the parent in a residential facility."

The first thing you need to do to prepare for the day when your parents need your help is to see a lawyer about preparing a durable power of attorney.

This allows you to have access to your parents' bank accounts to pay for doctor, hospital or nursing home expenses. This is dicey business, but can be even more difficult later on if your parent loses grip on his or her mental faculties.

Go to an attorney who really knows elder law (an emerging field) or check out the Web site of the National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys. The lawyer will advise you on how to handle financial matters to ensure that your parents qualify for all applicable state and federal aid. The rules here are pretty tricky.

For example, if a parent needs to go into a nursing home, the old practice used to be: Spend down or give away your parent's assets to qualify for Medicaid. Generally, that means exhausting all but $2,000 of his or her assets.

But current regulations make it much harder to simply empty your parent's bank accounts to qualify for Medicaid. If you're caught breaking the law, there are stiff penalties.

Remember, Medicaid will still be there to pay for nursing home care after all of your parent's assets are gone. "Use your money to stay out of a nursing home," Wexler says. "Don't make the nursing home your goal."

There are now 653 Area Agency on Aging offices throughout the country. These offices can be very helpful if you live close to your aging mother or father (60 percent of people over 60 have one child living within 10 miles). They can help assess your parent's condition and coordinate care.

If you live some distance away from your parent, consider hiring a geriatric care manager to act on your behalf. Typically, geriatric care managers have professional degrees and/or licenses in fields such as gerontology, psychology, family therapy, social work or nursing.

In effect, they're your surrogates, visiting parents, assessing their needs and sending reports back to you. And if it becomes necessary, they will find an appropriate care facility.

If your parent is well enough to stay at his or her own home, the geriatric care manager can arrange to have people come in to do cleaning, yard work and shopping. When parents need more personal or intensive help, geriatric care managers (or the local Area Agency on Aging) can assist you in finding people to help with dressing, bathing and food preparation, companionship and/or nursing care.

Call the National Association of Professional Geriatric Care Managers at (520) 881-8008 for the names of managers in your area. (The association expects to have a Web site soon.)

Although geriatric care mangers cost $75 to $200 per hour, they can be well worth the money to people who don't know where to turn. "People don't make rational decisions when it comes to their parents," Wexler says. "I know of one case where the daughter is paying $4,500 a month to keep her mother in a fancy residential facility.

"It's not better because it's more expensive," he says. "She could find one just as good for $1,800 a month. But she thinks by paying more she can buy her mother's love."

Professional care managers can also help prevent exploitation. Says Eileen Gold, a Los Angeles geriatric care manager, "I've had clients who are multimillionaires who had four teeth, one dress and dirty underwear and were constantly rewriting their will to anyone who was nice to them."

One caution: Professional geriatric care management isn't a skill acquired overnight. If you do need a geriatric care manager, Wexler advises, find one who has been in the field 10 years or more. And check references.

Most elderly people won't ever need a nursing home (only 5 percent of people over 65 require such care, as do only a quarter of people over 85). But when they do need it, the care can be very expensive ($40,000 to $60,000 a year).

But there are many people who are physically disabled but mentally fit who do perfectly well in board-and-care facilities. These facilities are often run by professional nurses.

The number of such facilities has exploded in recent years - especially the small, six-bed operations - and, at $1,800 to $3,000 a month, they're far cheaper than nursing homes. Although not covered by Medicare or Medicaid, most board-and-care expenses can be covered by Social Security, supplemented by a pension.

Bob Selig's parents did not have long-term care insurance, having waited too long to apply. By the time they did apply, they had pre-existing health conditions.

As a result, Selig must pay all his parents' expenses by himself. The cost, he says, is "gargantuan" - $20,000 a month. This includes two full-time nurse's aides (one for each parent) at $135 a day each, physical therapy for his mother at $100 an hour, and seven to 10 hours a week of visits from geriatric care managers starting at $130 or more an hour. It also includes $4,000 a month for his father's residential facility.

Selig would have gotten considerable financial help had his parents taken out long-term health care insurance. There's a Catch 22 to such coverage, of course. Apply before you are sick, or you can't get it. At age 55, a healthy adult would pay $400 to $1,600 a year for long-term health care insurance, depending on the options. Without such insurance, the House Select Committee on Aging found that more than two-thirds of elderly people living alone were at the poverty level after only three months in a nursing home.

If you want to buy long-term care insurance, for yourself or your parents, do it while you're healthy enough to qualify and young enough that the rates are affordable.

Baby boomers who are now starting to care for their parents can look forward to even longer lives themselves. If they watch their diets and exercise regularly, they can expect to live into their mid-80s or early 90s.

But baby boomers are not as likely to be as much of a burden on their kids as today's parents are. They are healthier and will enjoy more disability-free years. Some authorities now believe the upper limit for middle age should be 70, not 60.

Because people are enjoying more disability-free years, many will continue to work past normal retirement age. Furthermore, continuing improvements in medical technology will allow seniors to remain independent in their own homes much longer than before.

"I'm cautiously optimistic that the next couple of generations will live much healthier and much longer lives," says Jack Guralnik, chief of the Epidemiology and Demography Office at the National Institute on Aging.