Grieving Without Losing Yourself — Letters from a Stoic

A friend has died. The grief is real. But there is a right way and a wrong way to carry it. Letter 63 is Seneca's careful letter on mourning, neither cold nor sentimental.

He won't insist that Lucilius not mourn at all, though he thinks it the better path. What he resists is the excess that turns grief into performance. Excessive mourning, he observes, is often less about love than about proof of love, an advertisement, addressed to witnesses, that the loss was real and the connection deep. His philosopher friend Attalus put it well: memory of lost friends is like old wine or fruit with an agreeably acid taste, there is a bitterness, but it pleases.

Seneca's own position is warmer: I have had them as if I should one day lose them; I have lost them as if I have them still. He then confesses something that gives the letter unusual weight: he once wept so excessively for his friend Annaeus Serenus that he became one of the examples of men undone by grief. He now regrets it. His mistake was failing to imagine that Serenus, younger, healthy, might die before him.

The lesson he draws: think as much about the mortality of those you love as about your own. Whatever can happen at any time can happen today.