The Stoics practiced something often called premeditatio malorum, the premeditation of adversity. The idea was to deliberately consider that the things we value can change, disappear, or be taken from us. Health can fail. Money can be lost. Relationships can end. The people we love will not be with us forever.
The practice can sound grim. Why deliberately think about losing something while you still have it?
One common interpretation is that imagining loss prepares you for it. Rehearse the death, the separation, the illness, or the failure often enough and perhaps, when the real thing arrives, you will meet it with less fear and less pain.
I do not think that is a realistic promise, and I am not sure it is a desirable one either. You can remind yourself every morning that someone you love will die and still be devastated when they do. You can understand impermanence perfectly well in theory and discover, in a hospital room or after one unexpected phone call, that understanding has done very little to soften the immediate fact of absence.
Grief does not prove that the practice failed. It may mean that grief was never the thing the practice was supposed to remove.
Epictetus puts the idea in language that can sound almost brutal when read without context:
“Never say of anything, ‘I have lost it’; but, ‘I have returned it.’”
He applies this to property, to a wife, even to a child. While something has been given to you, he says, care for it, but do not regard it as permanently yours. He compares our situation to that of travelers staying in a hotel. You may use the room while you are there, but you were never promised the room indefinitely.
The language is severe but I think the idea underneath it is worth sitting with.
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Most of us know perfectly well that the people we love are mortal. We know relationships can end, health can change, homes can be lost, careers can disappear, and entire periods of life can close without asking whether we are ready. Knowing this intellectually does not stop us from living as though certain things have quietly become permanent.