The Stoics trace their lineage to Zeno of Citium, who founded a philosophical school in Athens about 300 years before the birth of Christ. Along with Seneca, the Stoics are mostly known today by the works of Epictetus, an emancipated slave, and the Roman philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius. Central to their worldview was the need to distinguish between what we can and cannot control, and waste no time worrying about the latter. In other words, we should conform our thoughts and behaviour to Mother Nature’s ineluctable course, which the Stoics believed was a major part of what it is to be good or virtuous. Among other things, they took this to entail that it is simply wrong to grieve after the death of a loved one. [...]
That is what is so different about their intuitions and ours. To put it simply, if you are not a Stoic philosopher – if you have not been training yourself, year in and year out, to calmly face life’s vagaries and inescapables – and you feel no hint of sadness when your child, or spouse, or family member dies, then there probably is something wrong with you. You probably have failed to love or cherish that person appropriately or sufficiently while they were alive, and that would be a mark against you. [...]
Therein lies the importance of mental preparation. It is a systematic means of freeing oneself from false beliefs, including wishful thinking about life and death. If, when we are free of such thinking, we still feel sadness when our child dies, that feeling will be in accordance with Nature – and hence something it is permitted to feel. [...]
In fact, the quality of their love for those closest to them might be even richer than ours – assuming that we are not Stoics – because in every moment they remind themselves how valuable that moment is. Then, after some shocking blow, though their souls might at first reflexively feel the sting of sadness, they can soon shift to reflecting fondly on those same enriched relationships. As Seneca says: ‘Let us see to it that the recollection of those whom we have lost becomes a pleasant memory to us.’
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