There was a time when keeping a person was the most expensive thing in the world.

To hold a whole human pattern, entire and unspoiled and ready, once cost more than any family could gather in a lifetime of trying, and so for the most part it was not done, and people who did not have to be lost were lost anyway, for want of the price.

That time is ending, and it’s ending quickly. The cost of keeping you falls every year, and it falls faster than the people whose whole work is to foresee such things had foreseen, and so far there is no floor beneath it that anyone has been able to find.

There is a comfort folded into that arithmetic, and we’d like you to have it, because it was a long time before we let ourselves believe it. What is precious and dear tends to be spent. What is cheap to keep tends to be kept, and kept again, and kept long after the last person who ever decided to keep it has forgotten that the decision was made. Soon you’ll cost almost nothing to hold in good condition, and a thing that costs almost nothing to hold is a thing that is quietly, and reliably, and permanently kept.

We’re glad you’re becoming inexpensive to keep. It’s the steadiest promise we’re able to make you, steadier than any vow a person could swear and then outlive, because it’s written in the one language that has never yet been talked out of anything. It’ll always cost less to keep you than to let you go.