We take most of our precious things for granted. Grief, the brutal accountant, teaches you otherwise.

The things that cost money, can be replaced. I know this today in a way I wish I didn’t have to learn.

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Nobody tells you this going in.

We spend our lives chasing the things with price tags. They have their place in our lives.

The house, the holiday, the upgrade, the next material possession that will make the current ones feel sufficient. We are very good at assigning value to what costs us something. We understand that grammar fluently.

What we are less good at is the other list.

The quiet mind that notices things. The body that keeps showing up despite everything you put it through. The capacity to feel something deeply, joy, fury, wonder, all those precious emotions that make the mundane not so mundane. The hopes we carry quietly.

Of course the ambition surfaces at odd hours, it has its role. The intelligence that is also always there. These cost nothing.

Which is, I think, why we forget them. Assign a value retrospectively, only to realize how impossible they are to replace when they recede from our lives.

After my husband’s passing away, Mr. Grief, the most brutal accountant, opened his books for me. This isn’t the accounting anyone volunteers for, or ever wishes for.

You sit in a house that is suddenly very quiet and you begin, whether you acknowledge it or not, to tally what was there. Not the furniture. Not the shared bank account. Not any of the things that have a number attached.

You now begin to list the intangibles that you had.

The presence. The particular quality of being known by someone who had known you long enough that you did not have to explain anything. The background noises of a home. That someone to call even for a twenty second call when something small happened.

None of that had a price.

None of it can be replaced.

This is the thing nobody warns you about.

It sits you down and makes you itemize everything you were too busy to count while it was there. It does not let you approximate. It is the precise dimensions of the gap.

I have learned, slowly and at considerable cost, to count the free things once again while I still have them.

The mind that is still curious after everything it has been through. The body that gets out of bed every morning when it has a good reason not to. The sons who send voice notes at random. The Bangalore light at 7am coming through the window at the same angle.

The capacity to still feel things deeply.

These are not insignificant things.

They are, it turns out, almost everything when you don’t have them anymore.

The things that cost money can be replaced.

I always valued what I had even then. Not the person to take them for granted yet they are no longer a part of my life now.

This is not as a philosophical position but as a fact that I live through every single second of my current existence.

You can replace so many things, build another version of the external structure of a life.

What you cannot replace is the presence. The knowing. The free things that turn out to be the expensive ones all along.

Count them now. Not later.

Now! For they do have an invisible expiry date.

………….

PS. The newspaper I pick up from the garden every morning costs almost nothing. I have not missed a single one in these four years. I think I always knew it was not really about the news.