Thirty-five years of age was thrust upon me less than a month ago, yet I denied it influence on my life as yet another label with which others would define me.  While turning 30 vexed me so, representing the loss of youth and opportunities missed, I laughed at it only months later when I realized how very silly I had been to grant it any significance.  Still, I cannot deny my humanity, and that is what gave it strength to worry me.  Turning 35, on the other hand, was only a change in age and unworthy of consideration beyond that single axiom.

For other people, however, my recent birthday indeed personifies time’s predaciousness, not just of people, either, but of all things.  My denying it teeth in my own life hinders it not from gnashing more directly at the existences of others.  It is, in that sense, a significant event.  Not for me, mind you, but for others, serving as a measuring table against the lives of those who came before.

Mom just informed me that my paternal grandmother (one of only two grandparents I have left now) has taken quite ill and is hospitalized.  She has suffered from ministrokes for months and was moved into assisted living some time ago.  She fell constantly, hurting herself, not to mention becoming increasingly unable to function mentally as well as physically.  She apparently is being treated for pneumonia and has had at least a few transfusions (while I can’t imagine how that’s related to pneumonia…).  They are also testing for some kind of bladder problem.  That would be in addition to treating her already near-debilitated physical state and horrifically subjugated mental competence.

What does this have to do with my turning 35 last month?  It seems rather simple to me, but let me explain for the slower members of the audience.

Dearest poppets, when I turned 35 last month it represented only a fleeting change in age for me, but for those I love dearly who preceded me on this planet it represented a significant event: the tick of the eternal clock of life which has certainly chimed more hours for them than for me.  I don’t see 35 as a major stepping stone in my life.  It is, however, a marker telling me that my loved ones are also aging, including my kids, my parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles and all manner of family members, and friends — all of those I hold dear.  In this particular case, my grandmother is two generations removed from me.  If I am now 35, even in the most conservative of estimates it places her age at a much higher value, especially when one considers that I have three siblings who all are older than I am.  And with age comes physical degradation and the innumerable ailments which generally accompany it.

Those who when I was a child were seen as old in that silly way that young people do are now at least old + 35 years, n’est ce pas?  As I am the youngest of four siblings, imagine then what predation time symbolizes within my family.  Were one to examine also my friends and other loved ones, it would be terribly obvious that existence itself breathes within the confines of those limits with which time subjugates us.

From the moment we are born time threatens us with fewer days before and more behind.  We struggle against the inevitability of its grasp, the reach of its finality.  Forever pursuing the illusive fountain of youth, battle has waged for millennia to vanquish with finality time’s ever-present whisper in our ears: I will have you.  There is no escape.  Run though you might, there is no refuge from my attack, and you will succumb to my folly as all things eventually do.

We feel its breath upon our necks, its cold and heartless wings as they enwrap us in their dead leathery embrace, and we struggle against it with our very essences.  We smother in the progressively lacking air; we watch helplessly as the body ages and withers, and in all cases dies.  We are reminded that life is a fleeting, temporary thing because no power can resist the call of time.  Even the heavens above befall their fates at its sole discretion.  Black holes, the most powerful force we have discovered to date, capable of swallowing stars and even whole galaxies, resist not time’s inestimable effect.  Death is become the ultimate mystery by way of the rhythmic march of moments, unceasing and unwavering, and we seek answers which our intellects and nature have yet to provide.

Even now as I sit here on the couch in the utter and complete silence of the afternoon, The Kids fast asleep in their diverse positions about me, I feel the cold eyes of time resting upon me.  It is a distant gaze, the unwavering eyes of a predator keen with sense and able of body to ensure success in every hunt.  I need not turn and look to know it is near to me, watching, considering, plotting always to ensure that all things end.  Resting within that scrutiny lays heartless accuracy and absolute supremacy, the ultimate hunter, the one that never fails.

I am not surprised that my grandmother is hospitalized in relatively poor condition.  I am not surprised that my aunt Jan died a few short days ago while her husband Charlie was moved to ICU because of his critical worsening of Alzheimer’s.  Shocking?  No.  How could they be?  You too must feel its gaze upon you even now, yes?  That involuntary shiver which touches you to the core; that tickle at the base of your neck that your primitive self translates to mean that danger now lurks near; the black and all-consuming darkness which lives within each of us and beckons us to its cold embrace with whispers of eternity and absolute assurances of its victory in these matters…  These things are known to you, are they not?

Whether you seek to hide them within the confines of your subconscious mind, or you deny yourself acknowledgment of these things because they matter not lest they exist with you in corporeal form and be susceptible to attack, no creature of awareness finds escape.

Time’s predation of all that is remains a true constant of the universe.  We see it in every way here on our own planet and across the universe, from people dying and the planet changing geologically to the consumption of stars and galaxies by the most remote black hole.  We are the prey.  Because we are alive, we are even more susceptible to its attack, incomprehensibly fragile.

I weep for loss.  Pain visits me when it visits those I love.  Death, whether it come announced or as a thief in the night, is the whole of time’s embrace upon all matters of the living regardless of form.  The mere state of existence demonstrates undeniable entrapment within its capacious jaws.  This is true of all things living or otherwise.  Until deemed a necessary consumable, interestingly enough, that which hunts us will keep its prey alive by healing old wounds.  To me it seems almost symbiotic, yet it is nothing more than an act of preservation of resources.

I wish Grandma the best.  I hope Grandpa continues to find the strength to carry on, caring for his wife while his own days continue draining from his body.  I know you are hunted.  I know you feel cornered.  Understand that we see the beast.  Despite our best hopes and efforts, we cannot stay its assault.  Our best minds can on occasion delay the certain outcome that ultimately befalls everything, yet nothing among us is able to fend off the most intimidating of life’s changes.  To all things comes an end.