by Joan Rivers

Not Doris Day, who once said, "The really frightening thing about middle age is that you know you'll grow out of it."

Not Tom Stoppard, who once said," Age is a high price to pay for maturity."

Not Lady Nancy Astor, British MP, who once said, "I refuse to admit that I'm more than 52, even if that does make my sons illegitimate."

And not Joan Rivers, who tells people, "I was born in 1962. And the room next to mine was 1963."

If aging were only a joke! But it's not and we cannot laugh it off. There is nothing funny about aging: It is rotten and depressing. Anyone who tells you otherwise just hasn't been paying attention. All those magazines that trumpet the pleasures of aging are lying to us. Willard Scott is lying to us on "The Today Show" when he celebrates Aunt Bessie's 100th birthday and tells us what a wonderful time she is having in her walker. Please don't insult our intelligence, Willard. No one who is sitting in damp Depends wants to be told that this is a wonderful moment in her life. She has probably been looking for Dr. Kevorkian's number.

My own mother was the first person who ever told me the truth about aging.

"Joan," she said, "getting older is horrific, but you have to go through it. And not just through it, but through it with dignity."

And that's precisely what I have been trying to do ever since: Go through it with dignity. It hasn't been easy - in fact, at times it's been brutally hard - but doing the very hard, sometimes seemingly impossible, has become a part of most women's lives. I am a woman who bounced back after losing her husband, her TV show, her Broadway show, her jewelry business, her credit rating, her daughter's best wishes, and her reason to get up in the morning -- or the early afternoon. I am a woman who, at one point a few years ago, was flat on her back -- and not for the best reason to assume that position.

However, from those multifaceted depths, I managed to bounce back, and after a brief period of feeling sorry for myself, I regained a rapport with my daughter, fought my way out of bankruptcy, began writing a new play, and gave rebirth to a career for which people were lighting candles.

Although I am now riding an incredibly happy wave in my life, I still don't want to be one day older. However, since I also don't want to be stupid, I now realize the profound wisdom of this thought: "The older I get, the luckier I am." There is simply no other way to look at aging!

Sure, I've been through a generous portion of hell, but I certainly can't change one bit of it. The only person who can change the past is a sloppy historian, so I concentrate on changing the present. A person with even a modest IQ knows that the present is the only place to live - except for South Hampton, of course. And so I spend all my time living in the now, not in the way back when or the one day when.

IQ does not increase with age. If you were a moron at 20, you'll be a moron at 75.

Seven years after Leonard Bernstein died, one of his daughters decided to sell several of his possessions at auction, including his piano.

"It was wrenching," she said. "However, preserving everything the way it was keeps you stalled in the past."

She wisely knew that everyone must live in the now. It is one of the basic ways to get through aging.

Live in the now, appreciate the now, enjoy the now, be involved in the now, and make sure you are included in the now. Update your ideas, your conversation, your reading list, your home, your gadgets, your politics, your wardrobe. Keep active, keep moving forward, keep looking good. Work hard on your body, your face, your job and your mind. My mother always believed that it's not how old you are but how you are old.

If you're smart, you'll approach aging with both mellowness and grit, with both serenity and an iron will, with both peace and passionate discipline. Aging still will suck, but it needn't entirely suck you in. If you are smart, you will resist aging sensibly: not by mindlessly worshipping youth but by making your life as good as it can be at every age - except 16. At 16, the only help you need is Dermasil.

"Yes, I've been trying to hold on to every element of my youth," says Faye Wattleton, head of the Center for Gender Equality. "I don't think there's anything wrong with that. If we can retard the process of aging, the quality of life is improved because aging does bring certain changes."

Absolutely, Faye. One of the changes it brings is a clicking in our joints when we get out of bed that leaves us wanting to be greased and lubed. But if you stagger to the mirror from time to time, with almost total honesty, you can say: "I'm amazing for my age. I look amazing, feel amazing, and my life is amazing, too," then you are winning the silent battle we are all fighting and you will have done it all by yourself!