I think that all the celebrations of our lives help us to face the passage of time, the changing of ourselves as we march towards death. It's interesting that a lot of the meaning that we attach to life's events occurs in the context of knowing that this experience is finite, that we will not likely be around for the next change of a century and that we better extract every bit of living from life this time around. The very fact that every person experiences life's wonder more intensely when faced with terminal illness makes us acutely aware that the preciousness of life is partly a function of its scarcity. No matter how much power or intelligence or wealth or wisdom or value we possess, life will not last. It will come to an end for each of us.
Death is a brave topic to take up.
Marking time off in this way makes us able to deal with it and appreciate it in small pieces. Life, while we're constantly aware that it's short, seems very long while one is living it. As the last commentator suggested and as Professor Marty implies, the finite quality of time is a necessity in our world, as the Biblical time and the universal time are too great for our comprehension. I enjoyed the humor in this essay. I'll be forty when the year 2000 comes around.