Seneca: You are mistaken! your brother has not lost the…

We often speak of death as though someone has been stolen from a place where they belonged forever. Seneca offers a different image: the person has gone ahead on a road all of us travel. For those who do not share his belief in an afterlife, the practical insight still holds. Mortality is not a special injustice assigned to one family; it is the common condition of being human. That fact does not make a particular death less painful. It does prevent us from treating pain as proof that reality has singled us out for punishment. The person you love is no longer where you can reach them, and that absence is real. But their life has not become nothing. It is present in what they changed, taught, and gave. Today, instead of asking why death exists, ask how this person would want their influence to continue through you. Carry something good forward.