Seneca fully believed that each day could be our last. He thought we should take our impending death into account without any hint of anxiety, but with happy acceptance, even if that death should arrive today. In practice, this means that we should not leave anything important undone when we go to bed at night. “Let us compose our thoughts,” he wrote, “as if we’ve reached the end. Let us postpone nothing. Let’s settle our accounts with life every day.”25 This practice encourages one to take nothing for granted, to look back on one’s life with gratitude, and it reminds us to live as fully as possible, according to our deepest values.
For Seneca, being able to go to sleep with gratitude, thinking life might truly be over, was a mark of someone who had lived a complete life. But then, if we should wake up in the morning, “let us receive it gladly,” and accept another day with gratitude. “The happiest and most cheerful possessor of himself,” Seneca wrote, “awaits the next day without anxiety. Anyone who says, ‘I have completed living,’ rises each morning with a profit, having gained an extra day.”26
CHAPTER 12
Give Grief Its Due
Tears fall no matter how we try to hold them back, and shedding them relieves the mind.
—Seneca, Letters 99.15
LET THE TEARS FLOW
The early Greek Stoics held an unusually harsh and strange theory: if a Stoic sage or wise person lost a close friend to death, he would not weep over his friend’s death because such emotions would originate from false opinions. Seneca rejected this view strongly and thought that tears of grief are wholly appropriate. He wrote, “I know that some men can be found whose wisdom is harsh rather than brave who say that a sage will never feel grief,” which he found to be inhuman.1 Elsewhere Seneca wrote, “I do not remove the sage from the general category of mankind, nor do I deny him a sense of pain as if he were some kind of rock with no feelings at all.”2
For Seneca, the tears we experience when we lose a loved one do not come from faulty judgments. They are the result of natural human feelings at the deepest level of our being. In other words, they are instinctual. In one of his letters, Seneca explains how he wept over the death of a close friend. It’s quite safe to assume that Seneca also wept over the death of his only child, a baby who died only twenty days before Seneca was banished to the island of Corsica by the Emperor Claudius. He describes the child dying in the arms of its grandmother—Seneca’s mother, Helvia—as she showered the baby with kisses. Marcus Aurelius also lost many children to death, and he is known to have wept in public over the death of his friends.
Seneca believed that when we weep, it’s just a natural, physiological response, a natural human feeling (see chapter 4). Because grief and weeping are instinctual, they’re not based on faulty beliefs or judgments as negative emotions are. Seneca was well aware that even animals mourn the loss of their offspring. Mother birds experience distress if they return to their nest and discover a missing egg. Even on an interspecies level, dogs often mourn the loss of a beloved master when that person passes away, in the same way people mourn the loss of a pet.
Seneca took grief seriously. In fact, he wrote five separate works consoling friends and family members who had lost loved ones.3 And in these works, he offers us valuable advice about how to grieve well, how to lessen the sting of grief before it appears, and how to transform grief into something better—happy memories of those we have lost.
Seneca’s basic approach to grief is that we should give grief its due. In other words, we should allow our natural tears to flow freely, but never force them, and never make our grief appear to be more intense just because we are in the presence of others.
For Seneca, there are different kinds of tears. Tears of shock occur when we first learn of the bitter loss of a loved one and when we see his or her lifeless body, perhaps at a funeral. We have no control over these tears. It’s as if they are pushed out of us by nature itself, as the pain of grief causes a person to gasp deeply and shakes the entire body. These kinds of tears are involuntary and beyond our control.4
Another kind of tears, which we might call tears of joy, appear when we sweetly remember someone we’ve lost. We think of the person’s pleasant voice, the happy conversations we once had, and his or her noteworthy actions. Unlike the harsher tears of shock, these fears are not forced on us, beyond our will, but spring from the happy and sweet memories we recall.5
Sometimes, even for a Stoic sage, tears sometimes just well up on their own. When this happens, it’s not a negative emotion but simply a mark of a person’s humanity. Similarly, Seneca points out, it’s possible to experience tears when one feels tranquil and at peace.6
FINDING A GOLDEN MEAN
Don’t let your eyes be dry when you have lost a friend, and don’t let them overflow. We may weep, but we must not wail.
—Seneca, Letters 63.1
Even grieving has its own kind of moderation.
—Seneca, Consolation to Marcia 3.4
For Seneca, because we’re human beings who are deeply bonded with those we love, it’s only natural that we will feel grief and shed tears at losing a loved one. It’s cathartic too. All that grief cannot be held inside; it needs to be released. Crying is a complex phenomenon, and is not fully understood. But on one level, we now know that crying releases oxytocin and endorphins. These chemicals help to relieve pain and, as mood enhancers, make people feel better and calm.7
Seneca had no problem with grief and falling tears, as long as they remained genuine or natural. But some people increase their grief beyond what nature requires. And some people push their grief to the point of madness. For example, little is known about Marcia, the first person Seneca ever wrote to, helping her to overcome her grief. But Seneca wrote to her because she was still in a deep state of despair over losing her son, who had died three years earlier. While Seneca believed that Marcia possessed courage and a strong character, he felt that she had kept the initial shock of her grief alive to the point where it had hardened into a severe kind of illness. As he put it, “You hug and hold onto your grief, keeping it alive in place of your son.”8
Seneca believed that we should seek some kind of moderation in grief and that it’s unnatural for extreme grief to be prolonged for lengthy periods. Seneca also objected to how people sometimes make their grief appear to be worse than it is when displaying it in public. As he told Lucilius, let’s allow our tears to flow, “but not compel them to do so. Let us weep according to our real emotion, but not in imitating others. Let’s not add anything to our real mourning, or make it greater by copying the example of others. The public display of grief demands more than genuine grief requires.”9
Seneca noted that, when surrounded by others, people often lament more loudly, so others can hear them. But once the onlookers depart, their own grief declines, since it’s no longer on show. Since Seneca valued authenticity, he believed that our sorrow should be genuine, or based on what we and nature require. It should never become a form of acting in front of an audience.
Because of this, Seneca sought a kind of moderation in grief. We don’t want our grief to be lacking in love or genuine feeling, but we don’t want it to become a form of acting—or, even worse, to resemble a form of madness. When we’ve lost someone close to us, being overwhelmed continuously by grief can become an unhealthy form of self-indulgence. Alternatively, feeling no sorrow would be insensitive and inhumane. Even in grief, we should seek a balance between reason and genuine affection.10 As Seneca recommends to his friend Polybius, who lost his brother,