How to Grieve Without Losing Yourself — Letters from a Stoic

A man named Marullus has lost his small son and is deep in grief. Letter 99 is the letter Seneca wrote to him, not a consolation in the conventional sense, but a rebuke. He had decided Marullus deserved criticism more than comfort. The opening move is sharp: you are behaving like a woman.

What would you do if you had lost an intimate friend? But the letter is more than provocation, it is a careful argument about what we actually lose when someone dies. A small child is a promise, not yet a person in full. What Marullus has lost is a fragment of time and the hope of what might have been.

This is real loss. But it is not license for grief without end. The most useful response to having loved someone is to be grateful you had them, not devastated that you lost them. Seneca pushes further: we already lose everything before we die, every day that passes is taken from us, the child we were is gone, the young man is gone.

We marshal these losses in broad array and find them unbearable, but they are simply time. His instruction to Marullus at the close is the same instruction he gives himself: rouse your spirit against Fortune, and watch for her missiles, not as if they might come, but as if they are bound to.