Nicholas Barclay’s Age And What It Means

Nicholas Barclay was born in 1980.

He would be forty-four or forty-five years old at the time of this writing.

This fact has a specific quality to it that distinguishes cases of long-term missing persons from other forms of death and loss.

The person continues to age — hypothetically, notionally — even as they remain absent and unaccounted for.

The thirteen-year-old boy who disappeared in 1994 would now be a middle-aged man.

This hypothetical aging is one of the stranger aspects of a long-unresolved missing persons case.