I think your cousin was in a third (a by far the worst) category - a "what could have been."
michael t. smith wrote:
When I was a senior in h.s. my cousin, a senior in college, was long-jumping 24'-11 3/4" and improving weekly when an accident paralyzed him from the waist down. It hit me that had I been in his place, it would have driven me crazy not to have found out how good I could have become. So that was the focus of my running career. We each have perhaps a dozen years,give or take, of athletic prime, after which we inevitably lose it at varying rates.
And inevitably, for each of us, it is ALL gone. That is the human condition. What matters is what you do with what you have, while you have it.
A rough paraphrase of a poem whose origin escapes me for the moment (at best): Of all the words uttered by men, these are the saddest: It might have been.