Feeling Their Absence: A Stoic’s Guide To Mourning Those We’ve Lost
By: Spencer Sekulin
Tags: Self Improvement, Life Lessons, Philosophy, Love, Friendship

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

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.