Seneca’s heartfelt letter to a mourning friend and what we can learn from it.
All of us will lose someone, just as all of us will be lost by someone else one day. It is a universal affliction that all of us shall face. The loss of someone we love.
When we experience the passing of a friend we held so dear, we feel as if we’ve lost an integral part of ourselves.
How are we to handle these times when they arise? All differ in their perception and handling of grief, but if there is one thing we may try, it is to make a study of all things — even things as melancholy as this. To understand how to come to terms with the necessary suffering of life.
One place I often turn to is the writings of those who came long before, whose words have remained relevant even through the centuries. One of such people is Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the Roman stoic philosopher, student of life, and by no means a stranger to pain and loss.
In his letter to his dear friend, Lucilius, Seneca offers his thoughts on mourning and loss, and how to find light even in this darkness. No stranger to the pains of life and the grief of departed friends, he writes so that his friend may handle it well, in a way that helps him through it rather than merely encouraging him to grieve.
For grief, too, has an end, and we all must find it.
Grief Is Inevitable — But So Is It Limited
Grief, as Seneca begins his letter with, is not something we can avoid in life:
“I am very sorry to hear of your friend Flaccus’ death. Still, I would not have you grieve unduly over it. I can scarcely venture to demand that you should not grieve at all — and yet I am convinced that it is better that way. But who will ever be granted that strength of character, unless he be a man already lifted far out of fortune’s reach?”
While it may come off as callous, Seneca lays the groundwork for what he really means, and for an approach that all of us can at least try.
“As for us, we can be pardoned for having given way to tears so long as they have not run down in excessive quantities and we have checked them for ourselves. When one has lost a friend one’s eyes should be neither dry nor streaming.”
He recalls the greatest of the Greek poets, who restricted a person’s right to cry to a single day — much harsher a thought than his assertion that we ought to ensure we do not grieve to the point of excess.
Grief should not be taken to either extreme: we should refrain from not shedding tears at all, and yet we should also be certain that we do not drown ourselves in them either.
Easier said than done, but as the letter carries on, we find deeper lessons that can ease our journey through this pain — and indeed, I say through. The pain of loss is a path. It is not a pit — unless we let it be.
All things in life are made to pass, and shall pass.
Grieve for the Right Reasons
For whom are you really crying?
Many people take this matter too far, using it for the wrongs reason, to make a show of it — as we so often see on television, where tears sell the more numerous they are spilt.
Sometimes, we’re just desperately trying to prove to ourselves and others that we really cared.
“Would you like to know what lies behind extravagant weeping and wailing? In our tears we are trying to find means of proving that we feel the loss. We are not being governed by our grief but parading it. No one ever goes into mourning for the benefit merely of himself. Oh, the miserable folly of it all — that there should be an element of ostentation in grief!”
Grieve because that person is gone. Grieve because their absence leaves a void you deeply feel. Not because you want others to pity you. Not for attention. Not for fame. Certainly not for air-time or money — as certain people have famously done.
The wisest grief can be done behind closed doors just as well as in the company of others. The real importance is the reason — to whose benefit are you shedding those tears? When we shed them just for the sake of the attention they draw, oh how that belittles the person we mourn!
It’s not about us. We should not make it about us.
And here’s another thing about this flamboyant, self-seeking kind of mourning: it repels others in the long run.
“Nothing makes itself unpopular quite so quickly as a person’s grief. When it is fresh it attracts people to its side, finds someone to offer it consolation; but if it is perpetual it becomes an object of ridicule.”
What does Seneca call us to do then? Much of his initial words sound callous, perhaps counter-intuitive. Does he mean that we show no grief at all? That we try to just forget those we lose?
Absolutely not.
“‘Come now’, you will be asking, ‘are you saying that I should forget a person who has been a friend?’ Well, you are not proposing to keep him very long in your memory if the memory is to last just as long as your grief. At any moment something or other will happen that will turn that long face of yours into a smiling one . . . At the moment you are keeping watch on your grief — but even as you do it is fading away, and the keener it is the quicker it is in stopping.”
Our grief need not last as long as the memory of the person we lost. There is an end to that, even if the void remains. And beyond it, there is still light — and as Seneca said, as your grief ebbs on its natural flow, you will smile again.
From Pain to Pleasure: Give Those You Loved The Gift of Joyful Remembrance
One day, you will smile again indeed. And you will smile for the very thing you lost — that you had it in the first place, that you shared a piece of your life with that person.
Those we have lost deserve something higher than our grief — to not inflict pain on us in death, but something better. They would want that more than our endless tears: to be remembered not in a way that deadens your life, but brightens it at every memory of them.
Seneca knows, as well all can, that there can be pleasure in these memories one day:
“Let us see to it that the recollection of those we have lost becomes a pleasure to us. Nobody really cares to cast his mind back to something which he is never going to think of without pain.”
There will always be pain in remembering the friends we have lost, but there need not only be pain — and pain need not be the greater part of it, but pleasure instead.
Pleasure for having known them.
And when there is more pleasure than pain in their memory, we have all the more reason to remember them, all the more desire to do so. And what a tribute that is to them, what a gift!
To remember them more because even in death they warm your heart. That even gone, they bring a smile to your face. No greater gift can you give to that person you loved than that.
Though there is pain in remembering, there is pain even now. For even as those we love are alive, we cannot help but sense that gnawing bitterness that we will one day lose them —and inversely, when they are lost, we feel the sweetness of having had them in the first place.
“Inevitable as it is that the names of persons who were dear to us and are now lost should cause us a gnawing sort of pain when we think about them, that pain is not without pleasure . . . Thinking of departed friends is to me something sweet and mellow. For when I had them with me it was with the feeling that I was going to lose them, and now that I have lost them I keep the feeling that I them with me still.”
We carry those we love with us even when they are gone, the brightness of their memory, the pleasure of their smile, the joy of the moments we shared, and all the bittersweet love that had been between us — ripening, even when they are gone, ripening in our hearts as we live on.
Even in loss, seeds of joy can be planted.
Cherishing Those You Love While They Live . . .
“Let us therefore go all out to make the most of friends, since no one can tell how long we shall have the opportunity.” — Seneca
We have the worst habit of not doing exactly that: of instead treating those we have as permanent, when they are as impermanent as the flowers of spring and the changing leaves of Autumn.
Seneca did the same thing with his dear friend Serenus — and mourned him so excessively he counted it as grief having broken him, because he had failed to appreciate his friend while he was alive:
“I realize now that my sorrowing in the way I did was mainly due to the fact that I had never considered the possibility of his dying before me. That he was younger than I was, a good deal younger too, was all that ever occurred to me — as if fate paid any regard to seniority! So let us bear it constantly in mind that those we are fond of are just as liable to death as we are ourselves.”
From this experience, Seneca admonishes his friend to treat his friends as the treasure they are, with an urgency that acknowledges the fleetingness of life and the fragile transience of those we share it with.
“Let us just think how often we leave them behind when we are setting out on some long journey or other, or how often we fail to see them when we are staying in the same area, and we shall realize that we have lost all too much time while they are still alive.”
How much time we have lost indeed.
It is a folly I have committed myself, treating people I loved with neglect, never thinking of the shortness of their lives. And when the time came that they departed from the world, it was too late to show that love, and I was left mourning the loss of something I only then realized I had been so blessed to have.
It is something I wish you never commit — but at the same time, I could never fault you for doing, for I have done it too, as did Seneca, as have so many. We can learn from it, though, and use it to dispel such foolishness from our lives. Seneca shows it in his sheer revulsion for such behavior:
“Can you stand people who treat friends with complete neglect and then mourn them to distraction, never caring about anyone unless they have lost him? And the reason they lament so extravagantly then is that they are afraid people may wonder whether they did care; they are looking for belated means of demonstrating their devotion!”
All the more is this shameful when that person was the only friend we had.
“If we have no other friends, we have done ourselves a greater injury than fortune has done us; she has deprived us of a single friend but we have deprived ourselves of every friend we have failed to make.”
Let us not be those who seek to desperately show that they cared only after they lose the people they ought to have cared about. Instead, let us show our love today, this very hour — to our family, to our friends, to those we share this world with, to those we share our hearts with.
To be faithful stewards of the gift of those around us, the gift that forever rests in the love we can hold for others.
The Antidote for Sorrow Is Love
Sorrow comes when we lose someone we love — and sorrow recedes when we learn to love again.
“You have buried someone you love. Now look for someone to love.” ~Seneca
Whoever you have lost, learn to love again. Find love again. It is, in the end, our very essence to love and be loved. Even when it hurts us, we must keep loving, lest we lose ourselves.
The pain of love is far outweighed by the joys of love itself.
Times Heals If We Let It, But We Don’t Need To Wait For That
Time heals wounds, even when it may not eliminate them completely. But to await our sorrow to fade in time, to mourn until we grow tired of it, until it hollows out and fades at last, is not the way we ought to handle it.
We can, as Seneca so eloquently says, learn to let go, and learn to carry on not when we simply get tired of sorrow, but when we make a conscious choice to abandon it:
“Even a person who has not deliberately put an end to his grief finds an end to it in the passing of time. And merely growing weary of sorrowing is quite shameful as a means of curing sorrow in the case of an enlightened man. I should prefer to see you abandoning grief that it abandoning you.”
We can abandon our grief before it abandons us.
To abandon our grief long before time can make it stale. Not to abandon the memory of the ones we’ve lost, but to abandon the grief that keeps us from healing.
To be strong, even in loss, strong enough to step onward into the life that still awaits — the life we can still live as a tribute to the ones we loved, the life we can cherish and live well in memory of all those whose memory we carry on our hearts.
The End of Our Journey
Life is a short matter, and all things that are fleeting are invariably precious.
Today you are live. Tomorrow you may not be.
Today that person is with you. Tomorrow they may not be.
Of this one thing we can be certain: one day, that will come to pass, for you, for them, for me, for all of us.
Seneca ends his beautiful letter by reminding his friend of the shortness of life, that even the morrow is not guaranteed to us, let alone the rest of our years — and that even though death will come, we need not look upon it as the end:
“Whatever can happen at any time can happen today. Let us reflect then, my dearest Lucilius, that we ourselves shall not be long in reaching the place we mourn his having reached. Perhaps, too, if only there is truth in the story told by sages and some welcome abode awaits us, he whom we suppose to be dead and gone has merely been sent on ahead.”