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Death, Grief & Impermanence

The Stoics thought about death deliberately and often, not out of morbidity but because a person who has genuinely absorbed that they will die makes different decisions about the time in front of them. Fear of death, on their diagnosis, is a judgement about something that has not happened and will not be experienced. These passages also cover the harder case: not your own death but other people's. Consolation, mourning, and the plain fact that everything and everyone here is on the way out.

50 passages

"Keep before your eyes day by day death and exile, and everything that seems terrible, but most of all death; and then you will never have any abject thought, nor will you yearn for anything beyond measure."

— Epictetus, The Enchiridion 21

"Fate is hanging over your head; while you have life, while you may, become good."

— Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations 4.17

"I walk in Nature's way until I shall lie down and rest, breathing my last in this from which I draw my daily breath, and lying down on this from which my father drew his vital seed, my mother her blood, my nurse her milk; from which for so many years I am fed and watered day by day; which bears my footstep and my misusing it for so many purposes."

— Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations 5.04

"For all things quickly fade and turn to fable, and quickly, too, utter oblivion covers them like sand."

— Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations 4.33

"'Look from above' at the spectacle of myriad herds, myriad rites, and manifold journeying in storm and calm; diversities of creatures who are being born, coming together, passing away."

— Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations 9.30

"Death is repose from sense-response, from the stimulus of impulse, from intellectual analysis and the service of the flesh."

— Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations 6.28

"You, Marcia, have still a mighty sorrow abiding with you, nevertheless it already appears to have become blunted: it is obstinate and enduring, but not so acute as it was at first: and this also will be taken from you piecemeal by succeeding years."

— Seneca, On Consolation - To Marcia 1.08

"All things that exist will very swiftly change; either they will pass into vapour, if we presume that matter is a whole, or else they will be dispersed into their atoms."

— Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations 6.04

"Before I became old I tried to live well; now that I am old, I shall try to die well; but dying well means dying gladly."

— Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius 61

"Nowhere, or we know not where.' For in this way you will continually see that man's life is smoke and nothingness, especially if you remind yourself that what has once changed will be no more in infinite Time."

— Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations 10.31

In summary

Marcus dominates this topic, and his approach is almost always the same move - widen the frame until the individual death stops looking like an exception. Whole generations gone, the famous forgotten alongside the obscure, the rememberers dying too. It is meant to console by scale. Whether that works on grief is a fair question, and Seneca's consolations are more honest about the difficulty than the argumentative passages are. The Stoic position is not that loss does not hurt but that it is not an injustice, and the distance between those two is where most readers will find the real argument.