“For the sole thing of which any man can be deprived is the present; since this is all he owns, and nobody can lose what is not his.” That's another quote by Marcus Aurelius. While I usually agree with the man, and I get where he is coming from here, I just don't agree with him. Yeah, I get it, nothing you have is really yours because when you die you lose it... blah, blah blah.
Obviously this man had never lost a loved one. My wife died. I did not. I lost my wife, my friend, my companion. Even worse, I lost potential. For while no man owns the future, we all plan for one anyway. My wife and I were no different. We had our plans and dreams. When her illness took a turn for the worse, and we had to separate, a lot of our ""potential" was taken from us. Who knows what we would have done, or if we would have had another child. Where we would have gone or what we would have done. When my wife died, I lost much more than my present. I lost a number of potentials. Now, not all of the potentials I lost were good. As in anything, there is the good and the bad. When she died, I lost the opportunity to do something differently with her. Unless you know you are dying tomorrow, the loss of potentials is devastating. Have things gotten better for me since my wife died. Yes, the only constant is change and with time, all things change. But I still miss my wife and sometimes, when I have absolutely nothing to do, I think back on the might have been. Although new futures have opened to me, I was forever deprived of the future I had been actively building. As for the present, the only way you can deprive someone of the present is to kill them. As long as they are alive (and, I would argue) conscious, they have a present. It may not be exactly what they expected, but they still have it. To me, losing my future is much worse than losing my present. It's worse, because every time I think of it, it comes back to haunt my present.
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