About six months ago, just before a cancer diagnosis and subsequent rounds of occasionally devastating chemotherapy, the subject in this space focused on deferred gratification.

Specifically, I wondered whether it was worth building a nest egg given the uncertainties of the aging process and the prospect of not being around to enjoy the fruits of your financial sacrifice.

It was more than an academic debate. It was then an open question as to whether I would make it to retirement. Despite some reasonably good outcomes from chemo treatments, it’s still an open question: The sort of indolent lymphoma lurking within my body usually isn’t curable in the sense most folks understand the word. It’s always there, and the patient may remain stable three months, three years or a lifetime, depending on fate and fortune.

The conclusion then was that building a nest egg was a worthwhile undertaking regardless of how things work out in the long run. Not that the Heaster Hoard is a humongous hunk of change, relatively speaking. It is, however, a good deal more than any young reporter had a right to expect to accumulate as an ink-stained wretch when starting out in this business 45 years ago.

Nothing has happened in the last six months to change my view. The thought now, as then, is that a nest egg is about feathering more than one’s own nest for a fling in those golden years. This is so despite those private bank marketing ads on TV asking if your money manager will arrange things so you can spend half the year in Europe and half in Palm Beach.

If that’s your goal for retirement, it’s misguided. A nest egg is about ensuring that if worse comes to worst there will be enough to see you through financial ordeals without becoming a burden to family and friends. That was the thought in good health, and it was only reinforced during my ordeal with cancer treatment.

There was no thought more comforting than knowing the extra charges that transcended insurance coverage wouldn’t impoverish my wife or become a burden to the kids. When thoughts on being removed from the mortal coil are a constant companion, you take your comforts where you can get them, and a nest egg, even a modest one, meant one less thing to have to fret about.

Tending a nest egg also helps keep priorities straight, as most Hurricane Katrina survivors will no doubt tell you. A month ago many probably counted things among their most valued personal possessions. Nowadays all probably will tell you that the health and happiness of loved ones is life’s most compelling priority. Things, as the truism goes, can always be replaced, but the health and happiness of loved ones is a more fleeting, irretrievable blessing. The nest egg, and the security it creates, helps ensure the sanctity of a family’s health and happiness, and should be regarded in this light. It also helps create a financial security that makes life so much more comfortable and manageable for all those who can benefit from a nest egg.

Tens of billions will be spent by governments and charitable institutions to help survivors of Katrina.

For some, though, lives can never be put whole again because dear ones have been lost forever. For some of the bereaved, the security of a nest egg would have made a critical difference, but wasn’t available at a time of dire crisis.

For some who made it through Katrina alive, the ability to build a nest egg was put far beyond their reach by poverty and unfortunate circumstance. But for anyone with the wherewithal to do so, regardless of age of health condition, building a nest egg should be one of life’s priorities because you never know when it may become one of the most important of your life’s possessions.