A Stoic practice
Stoicism and grief: a gentle practice for the hardest days
Stoicism does not ask you to stop grieving. Seneca, writing to people who had lost a child or a friend, accepted tears as natural and asked only that grief not be inflated or performed for others. The practice is to let the sorrow be what it is, notice what you are adding to it, and hold on to what the loss cannot take: the time you had.
The Stoics are often imagined as people who shrugged off loss. Their own writing says otherwise. Seneca wrote several letters and essays of consolation to people in deep grief, and in one letter he admits that he wept for a close friend more than he thought he should (Letters to Lucilius LXIII). His view was that sorrow is natural, and that feeling it is no failure of philosophy.
What he warned against was narrower: adding to grief. Adding can mean measuring your sorrow against what others expect, feeling you must suffer more to prove you loved, or turning the loss into a verdict on your whole life. There is no schedule here and no correct amount. Grief takes the time it takes. The practice below is not a way to finish grieving. It is a way through a hard hour, and a way to keep the person close while you go through it.
A gentle Stoic practice for grief
Go slowly. Skip any step that does not feel right today. There is nothing to get right here.
- 1Let it be as heavy as it is.
Sit down. If tears come, let them. Seneca's own word for this kind of sorrow was natural. There is nothing to fix in this step.
- 2Notice anything you are adding.
Gently ask whether you are carrying extra weight: guilt about what you should have said, a sense that you are grieving the wrong way, or a story that nothing will ever be good again. You do not have to argue with it. Just see it.
- 3Recall one specific memory.
Not a summary but a moment: something they said, a place, a meal. Seneca wrote that what we have shared with people stays ours, because the past cannot be taken back (Letters to Lucilius XCIX).
- 4Write one line to them, or about them.
A sentence is enough. Many people find that putting it into words, in private, is different from carrying it silently.
- 5Do one kind thing for your body.
Drink water, eat something small, step outside for a few minutes, or reach out to one person. Grief is tiring. Looking after yourself is part of honouring it.
What the Stoics wrote
Has he felt no pain? He has — no human virtue strips feeling away. But fear he does not feel. Standing unconquered, he gazes down upon his sufferings from a high place.
Even the Stoic picture of the wise person includes pain. Seneca is clear that no virtue removes feeling. What changes is the fear, and the extra suffering laid on top.
Add nothing to a natural sorrow, nor swell it by imitating what others do. The performance of grief asks more of us than the grief itself. Few people are sad when no one is watching.
Seneca is not asking anyone to grieve less. He is saying that the grief you actually feel is enough, and that you do not owe anyone a performance of it.
Why grieve over losing him, when keeping him brought no shield? Much of the people we loved still abides, even after fortune takes their bodies. The past belongs to us — nothing is more secure than what has been.
This comes from a letter to a friend, Marullus, who had lost a young son, and its opening question is hard to read. The comfort is in what follows: the time you shared does not disappear. It is one of the few things that is now completely safe.
More Stoic passages on death and loss →