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You are here: Home / Blog / Seneca Sundays: On grief for lost friends – Letter #63

Seneca Sundays: On grief for lost friends – Letter #63

Dan Cullum · Jun 27, 2021 ·

Note: This post is part of a weekly series called ‘Seneca Sundays’. Each week, I reflect on one of Seneca’s ‘Moral Letters to Lucilius’, and summarise the most practical and useful principles to share with you.

This letter touches on a tough subject: the grief we experience when a close friend passes away.

This was the first letter where I disagreed with many of Seneca’s points. For example, Seneca advocates against an extended period of mourning following the death of a friend. This view is at odds with modern medicine and psychology which advocates for a process of healthy grieving. I think we can forgive Seneca for holding some of these views 2,000 years ago, as there is still a lot of timeless wisdom in this letter we can learn from.

1. Greedily enjoy your friends

None of know how long we’ll get with our friends.

Yet we live as though they’ll always be there.

When we spend time with them, we should acknowledge—even if it’s just in our own minds—that one day we’ll lose them.

And when we inevitably lose them, because our time with them was so rich, we’ll still feel like they’re with us.

2. Find the pleasant loss

If the pain of loss is too great, we’ll never revisit our memories of that friend.

Seneca encourages us to “see to it that the recollection of those whom we have lost becomes a pleasant memory to us.” Even if “the names of those whom we have loved and lost come back to us with a sort of sting; there is a pleasure even in this sting.”

3. Don’t let modern life and its troubles come before your friends

Our best friends can live close by, yet we can be too focused on our work to spend time with them. Or perhaps we move to live in a distant land and slowly lose touch.

It’s easy to be careless and frivolous with our friendships—to be scarcely aware we’ve lost time whilst those we love are still alive.

4. Time does heal, but it’s not the only way

Although I don’t completely agree, I feel I must touch on Seneca’s view point here. He acknowledges that time eventually heals, however, his advice is for us to “abandon grief, rather than have grief abandon you.”

This is in line with a the key Stoic principle: we don’t control what happens to us, but we control both how we perceive that event, and how we respond to it.

5. Don’t take today, and your friendships, for granted

I think this point is best summarised by Seneca himself:

“Whatever can happen at any time can happen today.”

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