What the Stoics said about grief

Seneca’s letters to the bereaved

Most of the Stoic writing on grief that survives is by Seneca, and much of it comes from three works known as consolations. The consolation was an established form in Greek and Roman writing: a letter or short essay sent to someone after a death or a disaster, part sympathy and part argument.

Two of the three were written from exile. The emperor Claudius banished Seneca to Corsica in 41 CE, and he stayed there until 49 (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab)). In the letter to his mother he lists what she had already lost: her own mother, an uncle, her husband, three grandchildren, and Seneca’s own child, who died in her arms less than twenty days before news of his exile reached her (Consolation to Helvia 2). Marcia, when Seneca wrote to her, had been mourning her son for three years (Consolation to Marcia 1).

So these are not lectures from a comfortable distance. Seneca is quoted below in Aubrey Stewart’s 1889 translation, and there is a fuller introduction to the three works in our guide to Seneca’s consolations.

Grief is natural

The plainest statement comes near the end of the letter to Polybius.

Here Seneca takes the mourner’s side first. “Nature demands from us a certain amount of grief” (Consolation to Polybius 18), and he will not forbid it. Then he turns on the philosophers who say the wise man never mourns, men “whose wisdom is of a harsh rather than a brave character,” and suggests they “never can have been in the position of mourners.” That is a Stoic arguing against the tearless sage people still picture when they hear the word.

The same sentence draws a line between two kinds of grief. Nature asks for some grief, and “our imagination adds some more to it.” The tears are nature’s share. What Seneca is willing to argue with is the part we add, never the part we are given.

He makes the point to Marcia with a comparison anyone can check against their own life:

We feel a pang when someone we love leaves on a long trip. Anyone who has watched a car pull away at the start of a semester knows it. If a parting can do that, a death will, and Seneca does not pretend otherwise. His quarrel is with something else: “the mourning which public opinion enjoins,” meaning mourning done because people expect to see it.

The most candid of the three passages is the one he wrote to his mother:

Grief, he admits, does not take orders. You can compose your face and the tears come through anyway. And keeping busy doesn’t settle it: grief “driven away either by pleasure or by business rises again” (Consolation to Helvia 17). Seneca’s own answer for Helvia was philosophy, and he promised more for it than most readers today would; the chapter says a grief overcome by reason is appeased for good. You don’t have to accept that promise to recognize what he describes. The grief you hold off all day at work is often waiting in the car afterward. Seneca’s advice is not to outrun it.

For the wider Stoic account of feelings, including the first reactions no amount of training removes, see Stoicism and emotions.

What Seneca cautioned against

One of Seneca’s best-known writings on grief is Letter 63, to his friend Lucilius. The English translations of the Letters that most people read are still under copyright in many countries, so this site gives them in paraphrase, labeled as such:

He warns against two things, and sadness is neither of them. The first is grief as display: mourning measured for an audience, tears partly meant for the people watching. The letter opens, in our words, with a short rule for losing a friend: the eyes should be neither dry nor flooded, and tears are fitting where loud lament is not. The second is grief drawn out longer than it would run on its own, kept going partly because people expect it. Seneca hopes for the opposite, that remembering the dead becomes something you can do with pleasure.

The lines that matter most may come near the end. The man giving this advice says that when his friend Annaeus Serenus died, he grieved beyond all measure, and that, much against his will, he became an example of someone grief defeated. He is writing as someone who did not manage it either.

Not everything in the consolations is gentle

It would be dishonest to present these letters as only tender. Seneca opens the letter to Marcia by announcing that he means to do battle with her grief (Consolation to Marcia 1). He tells Polybius that a man in his position is watched, and must show the public how well he bears his loss (Consolation to Polybius 6). He reminds his mother, approvingly, that Roman custom gave widows ten months of mourning as a limit (Consolation to Helvia 16). Some of his arguments rest on Roman ideas about women, rank and public life that few readers will share. Take what helps and leave the rest.

Those limits belong to Roman custom and to Seneca’s arguments with particular people. The passages on this page set no date by which grief should be over. To Polybius he writes, “let your tears flow, but let them some day cease to flow.” Some day is not a deadline, and nothing on this page should be read as one.

Remembering with gratitude

Seneca’s most practical advice is about memory. He tells Polybius to “talk constantly about him, and keep him ever present in your memory” (Consolation to Polybius 18). Earlier in the same chapter, in our words, he points out that Polybius is a writer, and suggests he write something about his brother: stone monuments crumble, but a written memorial lasts.

To Marcia he puts a harder question.

Would she rather have had her son for a short time, or not at all? It is a blunt thing to ask a mother. But Seneca is not asking her to miss him less. He is asking her to let the years she had count, alongside the years she lost, and “to return thanks for that which you have enjoyed” (Consolation to Marcia 12).

Near the end of the letter he proposes another yardstick for a life cut short.

“Begin to reckon his age, not by years, but by virtues” (Consolation to Marcia 24). In the lines the excerpt leaves out, Seneca describes Metilius in particular: a young man who stayed close to his mother, who was shy and modest and turned down a soldier’s career to remain near her. The comfort is in the particulars, not in a general idea of a good person. The chapter goes on to describe the son’s soul set free of the body, a belief readers will take or leave according to their own.

You can try this on paper. Instead of the dates, write down what the person was like: the way your father answered the phone, the aunt who mailed newspaper clippings with notes in the margin, the friend who always remembered which coffee you drank. A life measured that way is not short.

Epictetus’s hard sayings

Epictetus taught rather than wrote, and his student Arrian condensed his teaching into the short Enchiridion, or Handbook. It contains the lines on loss that put many people off Stoicism. This is the hardest of them:

Read at a funeral, this is unbearable. It was not written for a funeral. It is an exercise for ordinary days, and it works upward, “beginning from the smallest”: first a clay pot, then the people you love. The instruction is to name the thing for what it is in the middle of loving it. A pot can break. The child you kiss goodnight is a human being, and human beings die. The idea is that a truth you have already said to yourself will not arrive later as a complete shock. He does not tell you to love less. The chapter takes it for granted that you are kissing your child.

Two cautions. First, this is something to practice on yourself, well before any loss, and never something to say to a person who has just lost someone. Nothing in it tells you to correct a mourner, and the next passage on this page says the opposite. Second, the promise that “you will not be disturbed” describes the direction Epictetus is pointing, not a test that a grieving parent has failed. Seneca, who belonged to the same school, had harsh words for a wisdom that leaves no room for mourning.

The practice of rehearsing a loss in advance now goes by a modern name, negative visualization. Our guide to negative visualization reads this chapter in full, along with Enchiridion 11, where Epictetus suggests saying that you have given something back rather than that you have lost it. Keeping your own death in view, a related idea, is known by the later Latin label memento mori.

Marcus Aurelius, who came to know Epictetus’s discourses through his teacher Rusticus (Meditations 1.7), makes a related move. In Meditations 9.40 he takes a prayer not to lose his little son and rewrites it as a prayer not to be afraid of losing him. More of his lines on loss are collected in Stoic quotes on grief, and what the Stoics wrote about death itself is in Stoic quotes on death.

Being with someone who grieves

The Handbook also covers the other side of a loss: what to do when it is someone else who is weeping.

People tend to remember the hard lines about opinion and the warning at the end. The middle is generous. Do not be unwilling “to show him sympathy,” and if it comes to that, “to lament with him” (Enchiridion 16). Epictetus leaves room for you to sit down and cry with your friend.

What he asks you to keep is your own footing, and he places it carefully: you make the distinction “in your own mind.” What he tells you to offer the other person, in words, is sympathy. Someone who meets a widow’s tears by telling her that her opinion is the problem has read the chapter backward. There is a practical reason for steadiness too, beyond Epictetus’s own: a household in mourning needs people who can still drive, cook, make the phone calls and come back next week.

Some ways to do that, in our words rather than his:

• Show up and say less. You don’t need the right sentence. Sitting in the kitchen while the kettle boils is often enough.
• Use the name. Say the name of the person who died, and ask for a story. Seneca told Polybius to talk about his brother, and a friend can make that easier by going first.
• Offer something specific. “I’m bringing dinner on Thursday” is easier to accept than “let me know if you need anything.”
• Come back later. Put the birthday and the anniversary in your calendar. The calls often thin out after the funeral, and the hard dates come months later.
• Keep the philosophy to yourself unless you are asked for it. That is where Epictetus puts it.

Small things for the days after

If the loss is yours, here are a few suggestions. They are ours, not the Stoics’; where an idea comes from their texts, the chapter is given.

• Say their name out loud. Tell the story at dinner, even if your voice goes. Seneca tells Polybius to tell other people what his brother said and did (Consolation to Polybius 18, in our words).
• Write things down while they are clear. The phrase they always used, the recipe, the joke only you two understood. Seneca suggested that Polybius, a writer, add a memoir of his brother to his works; a notebook or a note on your phone is a smaller version of the same idea.
• Give the grief some time on purpose. If work is filling every hour so that nothing can get in, Seneca’s warning to his mother applies (Consolation to Helvia 17). Look through photographs with someone who knew them, or go back to a place you went together.
• Let people help, and be specific. When someone asks what they can do, give them a real task: the groceries, a school pickup, telling the people at work.
• Expect the dates. The first birthday, the first holidays, the anniversary. Decide ahead of time where you will be and who you will be with.
• Don’t grade yourself. Seneca measured other people’s grief against Roman custom. You don’t have to measure yours against Seneca.

If you keep a short practice at the end of the day, the Evening Examination can hold some of this, gently. Its questions are all optional, and there is no score. On a hard night, one answer is enough. What you did well today may be that you got up, ate something and answered your sister’s message. Tomorrow I will can be a single small thing. Skip any question that doesn’t fit the day you had.