"He'd be sixty-seven now": the arithmetic of grief
By Rachel · Updated 2026-07-21 · 2 min read
The short answer
Grief math is the running sum grievers do without meaning to - the years since the death, the age the person would be now, the age you were when it happened. Many people even introduce themselves this way, in the grammar of "lost them X years ago at age Y". The counting is not stuck or morbid. It is love keeping a ledger, because the years since are the one figure about them that still goes on adding up.
You do the sum without meaning to.
Someone mentions a birthday, or a form asks for an age, and before you have decided to, you are counting. He would be sixty-seven now. She would be turning forty next spring.
The number arrives fully formed, as if a part of you has been keeping it running in the background all along.
The arithmetic nobody taught you
There is a kind of maths that only grievers do.
You count the years since. You count the age they would be now. You count how old you were when it happened, and how old you are now, and the gap between the two keeps widening.
So many of you introduce yourselves to each other in exactly this grammar. Lost my mum four years ago, at fifty-eight. Lost my dad when I was twenty-six, he was sixty-one.
Grief math is the sum you never sat down to learn and can never stop doing: the years since, the age they'd be, the age you were.
It is its own language. A whole introduction folded into two numbers.
The age that keeps moving
The hardest figure is the one that keeps changing.
The date they died holds still. But the age they would be does not. It ticks forward every year, on the birthday that still arrives whether or not there is anyone to have it.
So you find yourself giving them years they never got. Picturing the sixty-seven-year-old version of a man who stopped at sixty-four. Wondering what his hair would have done, whether he'd have needed the reading glasses, what he'd have made of the phone in your hand.
The person is fixed. The arithmetic is not. And the two of them drift further apart every year, which is its own strange grief, the growing distance between who they were and who they would be.
Counting is not morbid
People sometimes worry there is something wrong with the counting. That it is stuck, or morbid, to know off by heart that it has been 1,187 days.
It isn't. The counting is just love doing bookkeeping.
You keep the ledger because the numbers are the last thing still accruing. Everything else about them stopped, even as you keep finding new pieces of them. The years since are the one figure that goes on adding up, and to stop counting would feel like shutting a book you are not ready to shut.
Some of you count down, too, to the anniversary, to the birthday, feeling the date coming the way you feel weather. The body often knows the sum before the mind does.
The sum that outlives the shock
Years in, the arithmetic is still running.
You will be somewhere ordinary, a checkout, a red light, and the figure will surface again. Twelve years. He'd be seventy-six. You are older now than she ever got to be.
And you will do what you always do. You will hold the number for a second, turn it over, put it back in your pocket, and carry on with whatever you were doing, the sum still quietly ticking over underneath.
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