“The Boomer” is a column written for adults nearing retirement age and those already in their “golden years.” It will also promote reader interaction by posting e-mail responses and answering reader questions. E-mail your questions or topic ideas to thefoxboomer@gmail.com.

We spend so much time worrying about how we live. Should we spend more time thinking about how we die?

It’s something we boomers often don’t like to think about. After all, we’ve just reached an important milestone. On Jan. 1, the first members of the baby boomer generation turn 65. Ten thousand of us a day over 20 years amounts to 79 million.

But not all of us will make it, and the way we die has become a media flashpoint. As part of the Patient Protection and Affordability Care Act – better known as the Obama health-care plan – doctors were originally going to be reimbursed by Medicare for what’s known as end-of-life counseling. That was controversial, as it stoked fears of “death panels” deciding who can live and who can die.

The controversy was enough that President Obama put off the reimbursement.

But the issues are still there. In the end, the decision has to be made of how we want our final time to be, whether it is reimbursed by Medicare or not.

“End of life counseling is about whether a person will have a good death or a bad death,” says Robert Quinlan, an insurance broker and founder of QuinlanCare in New York.

Is there such a thing as a good death? Sure. Think of palliative care, with relief from pain and anxiety and depression. Others just want to pull the plug, saving themselves and their families from pain, suffering and medical bills.

For some people, though, such a move is against their religious beliefs, or represents a lack of faith. They want to live, despite the odds and perceived lack of time.

At its heart, end-of-life counseling was about these issues. Under the regulations promulgated for the new health law, doctors would be reimbursed for having these conversations as part of regular, annual physicals now allowed under Medicare. That meant that it could come up every year, and evolve along with your health.

It was the frequency of the counseling that helped raise eyebrows. “I don't think I need to be reminded of this conversation every year,” Quinlan says. “It is something that my wife and I have discussed a number of times over the years, and we are both very clear as to what our end-of-life treatment should be.”

And that’s the key takeaway for us boomers, regardless of where you stand on the end-of-life debate. Just as we can do our own retirement planning, we can also do our own death planning, talking to our families on a regular basis and making sure we have the right paperwork so our wishes are honored.

Right now, there are two documents to think about: a health-care proxy and a living will.

A health-care proxy appoints someone else to make decisions on your behalf. Ideally, the person who makes those decisions (often one of your children) is in tune with your own thinking about how you want to go out. You can even make your wishes known in the proxy itself – for instance specifying that you don’t want to be kept on life support. Ultimately, your doctor, once he determines you can’t make decisions on your own, defers to the proxy and the agent you appointed.

A living will allows you to lay out in detail how you want to be treated in dire medical situations, and it takes the decision making out of other peoples’ hands. The drawback is that it is often not specific enough to deal with every eventuality.

There are two things to remember about both living wills and health-care proxies. First, consult a lawyer when you’re drawing them up because there are different laws for different states.

Second, remember to make sure the right people get copies of either document. Doctors and hospitals need to see the documents for them to work. Don’t draw them up and leave them in a side-table drawer.

Will panels ultimately decide whether we live or die? Will we have to be reminded by our doctors every year that death is around the corner? Can we trust our kids not to the pull the plug at the first sign of a sniffle? Who knows.

But we’re the boomers, and we made our mark on the world by how we lived. Let’s prove we also know how to go out in style.

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