CHAPEL HILL - Early last year Bill and Judy Tow shared a 35-year marriage, and an art-filled house on a woodsy lot. They had enough money for life's basics, plus a cruise now and then.

Then they learned that Judy had cancer.

"She died three weeks short of her 73rd birthday," said Bill, himself two years past open-heart surgery.

Along with grief and depression over his wife's death last month, Bill Tow, 72, is dealing with a world of trouble. Facing medical debt and arrears of $19,000 on an adjustable-rate mortgage, he's staving off foreclosure by selling the home he shared with Judy for two decades.

Large forces -- the foreclosure crisis, soaring health-care expenses and the gasoline-driven cost increases of daily living -- combined with Judy's incurable cancer to tip Bill Tow's life over the line from middle-class contentment into near financial ruin.

It's a situation that may confront an increasing number of aging North Carolinians. Studies show that the Tows' experience reflects national trends: Older homeowners are more likely to face foreclosure than younger owners, and lower-income seniors with cancer spend five times as much of their incomes on out-of-pocket expenses as wealthier patients.

Housing, health care and gas prices figure largely in presidential politics this year, but none of the proposed solutions will come quickly enough to keep Bill Tow from losing his home.

"Stories like this break my heart," said Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard law professor who studies older Americans' financial problems. "Unlike younger people with years of work ahead, the bounce-back for older people is almost nonexistent. The best solution for them would be a stronger safety net that doesn't force them to trade their financial security for medical care."

Living in the middle class

Bill, who grew up in Manhattan, met and married Judy in New York City in 1972. New Jersey-born and Boston educated, Judy captivated him with her wide-ranging interests and charm.

"This woman had such a zest for life," Bill said. "There was something she did just by smiling, or looking at you, or listening."

A one-time print and broadcast journalist, Bill Tow turned to corporate communications for the former Eastern Airlines. With no children to look after, the Tows could, and often did, pick up and go when they felt like it.

"We did a lot of traveling," Tow said. "We went to Bermuda, Copenhagen, Colorado, California ..."

The couple moved to North Carolina, settling in Durham, where Bill Tow had worked in television news in the early '60s, just out of Marshall University. Based on his New York compensation, he couldn't find work in his field in the Triangle and held a variety of jobs instead.

Judy worked at Dillard's for several years.

"We bought this house in 1988 -- we took out a 30-year mortgage," he said.

Their house continued to gain value in the hot Chapel Hill real estate market and, at the turn of the century, they refinanced to put some of their equity to use. Like many older people, they had a good amount of equity in their homes, making them attractive to lenders out to profit from escalating interest payments.

Part of the financial crisis that has 3 million Americans struggling to make mortgage payments is a sharp increase in bankruptcy filings among people over 55 -- from 8.2 percent of debtors in 1991 to 22.3 percent in 2007, said Harvard researcher Warren.

"When older Americans face serious financial problems, they have little hope of ever recovering," she said.

Before their illnesses, both Tows worked part time and received Social Security, bringing in about $35,000 as a couple.

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