About death. 1.

Just a few days ago, I lost my dear uncle.
I will keep his name unspoken here because, as you may know, in certain matters, I have always been somewhat reserved.

So, unlike what I usually do, I will speak in the first person.

I loved this uncle dearly; I can say he was like a second father figure to me. What fascinated me most about him—and what I will carry within me for the rest of my life as the most precious thing he left me, was his philosophy. It was different from mine, less convoluted, simpler, and it unfolded in him with the utmost naturalness, through his words and actions. This way of being, in a man who cherished the good things in life, could be summed up in a single phrase: "Life is far too important to be taken seriously." These words have echoed in my mind like a mantra ever since I first came across them somewhere in the vast ocean of thought. They belong to Oscar Wilde. I deeply love this quote, and though my uncle had no direct connection to it—he was not much of a reader—he embodied it perfectly. Always humorous, always sincere, he offered everyone around him, his friends, his family, his colleagues, a quiet, sincere love, free of pretense, and innate kindness that made him magnetic. I can still picture his birthdays; his phone would ring non-stop from morning until night. Even as he lay in the hospital, confined to a hospital bed, the steady stream of visitors never stopped—from high-ranking state officials (he worked in public service) to the ordinary civil servants he worked alongside every day. I believe what people loved about him was his sincerity and authenticity— always genuine, never overbearing, free of pretension or arrogance, never expecting anything in return for his kindness. Just that quiet, effortless dignity, unpretentious yet profound, the kind embodied by those who truly appreciate life.

I think people loved him also because he made them laugh.
But today is not a time for laughter.

How does one face the death of a loved one?
I know this all too well—I lost my mother at a young age.

But today, having since opened myself to philosophy, I want to go further, to better understand what our Stoic figures advise us when confronted with death.

One text comes to mind right away, one I have come across here and there before: Of Consolation: To Marcia by Seneca. It is one of his most famous works and also the earliest of his writings that we know of. In this letter, Seneca addresses Marcia, a mother devastated by the loss of her son. Like a great sage whose words have echoed through the centuries, he offers her a true philosophical exercise, a way to tame grief without allowing it surrendering to it.

You, {{username}}, who are reading this today—perhaps you are going through the loss of a loved one, seeking comfort in Stoicism, a light in the midst of pain. Or maybe you are exploring these lines as part of your learning, without being directly affected by loss. In either case, this is a valuable pursuit, for the lessons we can draw from grief are not confined to grief alone—they illuminate all forms of sorrow.

~

How can I come to terms with the now undeniable absence of this uncle?
How can I tame this grief and these thoughts that keep returning to my mind like a boomerang?
As I immersed myself in Seneca’s original text, I saw three distinct parts. While his letter is rich with reflections and filled with nuanced, indirect wisdom, I will focus here on these three main ideas, which I will now share with you:

1/ Our pre-emotions are natural; we cannot stop them.
2/ Death is part of a greater Whole.
3/ It’s a matter of perspective.

Let me dive into the first point: these pre-emotions.

My uncle had an incurable cancer—I had prepared myself for it. Yet, when the phone rang that day, my body reacted before my mind could. My heart clenched, my eyes welled up, and for a brief moment, I felt as if I were falling, as if something had been torn from beneath my feet.

In practicing my philosophy, I then asked myself:
Is this a sign of weakness?
A lack of wisdom?

And Seneca’s words remind me that these emotions are neither weaknesses nor a failure of wisdom:

These natural emotions ripple through my body, the first inevitable tremors triggered by the shock of hearing what I knew was coming. What I find in Of Consolations are the words of a man who understands that grief is inevitable. Seneca knows that when pain arises, it is the instinctive, almost animal response to what the Stoics call pre-emotions¹. This immense pain is the first wave of mourning, the fatal sadness that strikes me before I can even summon reason to push it back. My emotions—raw, like concrete slowly pouring from the gaping mouth of a cement mixer, covering the surface inch by inch, have not yet become judgment at this stage. The lump in my throat upon hearing the news, the tears welling up, the hollow feeling within me, all of it is natural.

The real question meant for me is: what should I do with this sadness?
Should I let it overwhelm me since there is nothing I can do about it anyway?
Should I simply let time do its work, as people always say?

Once again, I know the answer is no, just as I know that practice is far more challenging than theory. But if I allow this grief to stretch into endless lamentation, taking root in my mind as an inevitable and uncontrollable state, without setting any boundaries, my surrender to this emotion will turn into a form of passion—in the Greek sense of the word—destructive and consuming; a melancholy I no longer wish to escape, a weight that will slowly but surely wear me down over time. But. If I choose to see these initial reactions as signals and then determine my response, if I make the conscious effort not to let grief settle over me like an unbearable weight, then, despite the sorrow, I will slowly begin to rebuild my mental freedom.

I must choose what comes next.

I cannot stop sadness from being present today. Losing a loved one—someone I once saw through the eyes of a child, even if I can no longer remember them, yet whose love has since permeated my very being, is no small thing. But I can choose not to let it become a weight I bear for eternity.

The first tear is instinctive, Seneca tells me.
The second is a choice.

In the end, we are our choices, as Camus once said.

Beyond the natural reaction, everything is a matter of choice.

Even in sorrow, once pre-emotions have passed, life remains a matter of choice.

~

The second theme, I tell myself as I read Of consolation, is my belonging to the greater Whole, the Universe itself. Space and time intertwined, the birth and unfolding of the cosmos, and the unwritten future that lies ahead.
The physical dimension of our philosophy.

What else could possibly happen when we lose someone, other than seeing their death as a profound rupture, an unbearable injustice, a departure that should never have occurred? As if, until the end of time, we could have gone on loving each other in quiet silence.

But if I rise above this pain, if I free myself from the weight of grief, what would I see? I would see that death is not an accident; it is the sorrowful note in a melody that sings endlessly—a melody filled with bursts of joy and longing, moments of serene and soothing fullness, passages where deep tones echo in the abyss of sorrow. And within this melody, death is not an accident. It is the natural continuation of a divine sequence in the grand order of things. By embracing this perspective, I cultivate a deeply cosmic vision of existence. If I truly integrate it, I become part of a vast system, a universal order where nothing is ever truly lost, only transformed.

Seneca reminds me in his Consolations that death is not an absolute end, but a return to nature.

We all return to the dust from which we came. Every tiny atom of life is destined to revert to its original state, everything that comes into being must one day fade, only to take shape again. The seven billion people on this Earth will one day exhale their final breath. In a few billion years, the Earth itself will be nothing more than a faded trace in the cosmos when the Sun depletes the energy that keeps it alive. And then, who will be left to mourn us? And why should we grieve before the laws of nature?

What I call loss today is merely the final phase of a cycle that repeats for eternity, a tiny fragment of a universal order that, within itself, created endings to make way for new beginnings. This ending is like the last words of a book I have loved immensely, each page having been a delight, yet now it must take its place on the shelf, where it was always destined to rest. And yet, now, it is no longer accessible, always within reach, but locked away beyond a barrier. I can only recall the enveloping warmth of the emotions it once gave me, when I sat by the fire, turning its pages. Such are the laws of the universe. They are neither sorrowful nor joyful, they simply are. It is up to me to understand them, to embrace them in all their vastness, without clinging to the illusion of permanence, to the false belief that anything, love or sorrow, will last forever, to the naive thought that this bond between myself and another was mine to hold, or that either of us alone had the power to bring it to an end.

Like every falling leaf,
every fading star,
every wave returning to the ocean,
my uncle has returned to the origins.

When I think of my uncle, I want to imagine him this way: not as a life torn away, but as a part of the great Whole, continuing its journey in another form, under another vibration. He has not vanished. He has returned to the essence, to the universe—just as I will one day, just as each of my seven billion brothers and sisters who love and grieve in unison with every passing second, from the dawn of time, across cities and countrysides, from the smallest Pacific island to the heights of New York’s skyscrapers.

It does not erase the pain.
But it soothes it.
It anchors my grief in something greater than my own suffering.

~

Finally, in this third part, I want to remind myself that everything depends on my inner disposition toward grief.

In his Consolations, Seneca presents Marcia with the contrasting portraits of two grieving women. I could set my fingers in motion on the keyboard to put this idea into my own words, but instead, I will turn to Seneca’s own passages to remind myself of one essential truth: in the face of grief, I must make a choice. The choice of my mental state, of the philosophy that will guide me through mourning. This choice will determine whether I keep my uncle’s memory alive or let it fade into silence. And if I choose to keep him alive, how will I do so? Through the sorrowful memory of his death, or through the comforting recollection of the happy moments we shared?

Seneca speaks of two women,
Octavia, who lost her son Marcellus, who...

“never ceased to weep and sob during her whole life, never endured to listen to wholesome advice, never even allowed her thoughts to be diverted from her sorrow. She remained during her whole life just as she was during the funeral, with all the strength of her mind intently fixed upon one subject. I do not say that she lacked the courage to shake off her grief, but, she refused to be comforted, thought that it would be a second bereavement to lose her tears, and would not have any portrait of her darling son, nor allow any allusion to be made to him. She hated all mothers, and raged against Livia with especial fury, because it seemed as though the brilliant prospect once in store for her own child was now transferred to Livia's son. Passing all her days in darkened rooms and alone, not conversing even with her brother, she refused to accept the poems which were composed in memory of Marcellus, and all the other honours paid him by literature, and closed her ears against all consolation. She lived buried and hidden from view, neglecting her accustomed duties, and actually angry with the excessive splendour of her brother's prosperity, in which she shared. Though surrounded by her children and grandchildren, she would not lay aside her mourning garb, though by retaining it she seemed to put a slight upon all her relations, in thinking herself bereaved in spite of their being alive.” ²

This is how Octavia experienced the most terrible loss a parent can endure: the death of her beloved child.

But,
there is another path.
A path where memory is not a source of suffering but an act of tribute. This is the path chosen by Livia, when shet lost her son Drusus, when she

“at last laid him in the tomb, she left her sorrow there with him, and grieved no more than was becoming to a Caesar or due to a son. She did not cease to make frequent mention of the name of her Drusus, to set up his portrait in all places, both public and private, and to speak of him and listen while others spoke of him with the greatest pleasure: she lived with his memory; which none can embrace and consort with who has made it painful to himself.” ³

And Seneca, addressing Marcia—and, nearly two thousand years later, speaking to me—unfolds the rest of the story, where two paths, born from the same loss, take radically different courses.

This first scenario is that of Octavia, who spent the rest of her days in despair. And Seneca warns Marcia against following the same path:

“If you prefer to follow the former, you will remove yourself from the number of the living; you will shun the sight both of other people's children and of your own, and even of him whose loss you deplore; you will be looked upon by mothers as an omen of evil; you will refuse to take part in honourable, permissible pleasures, thinking them unbecoming for one so afflicted; you will be loath to linger above ground, and will be especially angry with your age, because it will not straightway bring your life abruptly to an end. I here put the best construction on what is really most contemptible and foreign to your character. I mean that you will show yourself unwilling to live, and unable to die.” ³

And the second scenario is that of Livia:

“If, on the other hand, showing a milder and better regulated spirit, you try to follow the example of the latter most exalted lady, you will not be in misery, nor will you wear your life out with suffering. You will show more respect for the youth himself, who well deserves that it should make you glad to speak and think of him, if you make him able to meet his mother with a cheerful countenance, even as he was wont to do when alive.” ³

These two paths lie before you, I tell myself.
One traps you in endless sorrow, the other transforms grief into a noble remembrance.
As I mourn my dear uncle, which path will I choose?
The answer is in the text.