On Losing Someone You Love
Why the Stoics didn’t want you to suppress your pain and how to stop building an identity around your loss.
My grandmother passed away four years ago. She was a large part of my childhood, and in the years since she's been gone I have thought about her more than I ever did while she was alive. Grief does that. It returns the person to you in a different form, after you no longer have them in the form you were used to. If you have ever lost someone you love, you already know that no writing can touch what you carry. Words don’t go where grief goes. I write this knowing that, and knowing some of you are reading it while the loss is still raw, and others are reading it while carrying something older that never quite settled.
Nothing here will lift what you’re carrying. The Stoics never claimed their philosophy could. What they offered, and what I want to pass on as carefully as I can, is a way of thinking about grief that doesn’t shame you for feeling it and doesn’t trap you inside it.
The Stoics have a reputation for being cold about grief, and almost everything the standard picture says they meant is wrong.
The reputation comes from three places, and once you know where it comes from you can see how the misreading happened. Epictetus has a line about kissing your child as though they might die tomorrow, which sounds chilling out of context and has been quoted out of context for two thousand years. The word apatheia gets translated as having no feelings, when what the Stoics meant was something closer to not being controlled by reactive passions. And the practice of premeditatio malorum, the deliberate contemplation of loss, sounds morbid until you understand it as a way of refusing to take what you love for granted.
Put together, these three things produced a caricature of Stoicism as the philosophy of the stiff upper lip. Don’t grieve. Don’t feel. Get on with it.
This is the opposite of what they actually said.
In one of his letters to Lucilius, Seneca responds to the death of Lucilius’s friend Flaccus. The letter survives as Letter 63 in his collected correspondence, and it contains one of the most overlooked sentences in the Stoic tradition on the subject of grief.
Seneca’s position, restated in plain modern English:
Don’t weep too much, and don’t refrain from weeping.
That’s the Stoic position on grief. The tears are not the problem. Pretending the tears shouldn’t be there is one kind of problem. Building a life around the tears is another kind of problem. Between those two is where the Stoics actually lived.
Seneca elaborated and wrote that to feel no grief at the loss of a friend would mean we hadn’t really had a friend. The grief is the evidence that the love was real. Removing the grief would mean removing the love retrospectively, which is exactly the move the caricature accuses Stoicism of recommending and which the actual tradition consistently refused.
The philosophical work underneath this distinction was done over generations within the Stoic school. Later Stoic writers distinguished between the first involuntary movements of emotion and the judgments we add afterward. When you lose someone you love, the first wave of feeling, the gasp, the tears, the way the body buckles when the news arrives, was not treated as a fully chosen moral failure. It was the kind of thing that can happen before reason has had time to assent or refuse. No philosophy could or should try to legislate it out of existence.
The strictest early version of Stoicism had leaned toward treating emotional responses as judgments through and through, which means in principle they could be reasoned with. Later thinkers, including Posidonius, complicated that picture. Some responses arrive before reason gets there.
Grief, in its first wave, is one of them.
To tell someone in fresh loss not to feel what they’re feeling is to ask them to perform a kind of mental gymnastics that human bodies aren’t built for and that no Stoic worth reading ever actually recommended.
What the Stoics did want to talk about is what we do with the grief afterward. The first wave isn’t up for evaluation.
What comes after is.
There are two ways we tend to betray our grief, and both of them are betrayals of the love that produced it.
The first is suppression. Treating grief as weakness. Performing okayness in front of others, and increasingly in front of ourselves. Moving on quickly because the people around us seem to want us to. Filing the loss into the past tense and refusing to revisit it, because revisiting hurts.
The Stoics noticed this and called it what it is. If we can lose someone we loved and feel nothing, we are saying retroactively that we hadn’t really had them. The suppression looks like strength. It is actually a small denial, repeated daily, that the love was ever there.
The second betrayal is the opposite. Building an identity around the loss. Letting the grief organize the rest of life. Treating the grief as the thing we owe the person we lost, and slowly converting them into an emblem of our suffering rather than letting them remain who they actually were.
This one is harder to see clearly, because it feels like loyalty. Doesn’t it seem disloyal to soften? To allow joy back in? To find ourselves laughing one day and realize we forgot for an hour that they were gone?
The person clinging to grief as devotion is usually avoiding something harder than mourning. Grief that stays a wound asks nothing of you except that you keep it. Grief that becomes a continuing influence asks you to act on what they gave you, in your own life, with no further confirmation from them about whether you’re doing it right. The grief stays intact because the alternative is to convert the loss from something done to you into something you now have to do something with. The wound is the easier position.
Seneca anticipated this and wrote a long consolation to a woman named Marcia, who had lost her son three years before and was still organizing her life around the loss as if it had happened that morning. He is not gentle by modern standards. He believes her grief has become its own thing, separate now from the love that produced it.
“Three years have already passed, and still your grief has lost none of its first poignancy, but renews and strengthens itself day by day, and has now dwelt so long with you that it has acquired a domicile in your mind, and actually thinks that it would be base to leave it. All vices sink into our whole being, if we do not crush them before they gain a footing; and in like manner these sad, pitiable, and discordant feelings end by feeding upon their own bitterness, until the unhappy mind takes a sort of morbid delight in grief. I should have liked, therefore, to have attempted to effect this cure in the earliest stages of the disorder, before its force was fully developed; it might have been checked by milder remedies, but now that it has been confirmed by time it cannot be beaten without a hard struggle.” — Seneca, Consolation to Marcia, 1.7.
The phrase to sit with is “acquired a domicile in your mind.” The grief has become a tenant. It has its own room. It has lived there long enough that Marcia has started believing it would be shameful to leave it, which is Seneca’s diagnosis. Earlier in the same letter, he puts the same idea more bluntly. He tells Marcia he intends to dry her eyes, which “already, to tell you the truth, are weeping more from habit than from sorrow.” That is the moment the grief and the love come apart. The tears keep arriving, but they are no longer arriving from the place the love lived. They are arriving from the routine the loss carved.
Seneca was hard on timing. He thought time usually does its work, and that three years was already long enough for the usual softening to have happened. In Marcia’s case it hadn’t, which is why he wrote.
I don’t want to pass that timing on. There is no correct date by which grief should have resolved into something gentler, and the people I’ve known who carry old grief well have not been on anyone’s schedule.
What I want to take from Seneca is the diagnostic underneath the timing, not the timing itself.
Grief can eventually stop expressing love and start feeding on itself.
Duration tells you nothing. A grief of two months can already be habit, and a grief of ten years can still be doing real work. What matters is what the grief is still for. Marcia’s son would not have wanted to be remembered as a wound. By keeping the grief intact, she was preserving him as a wound rather than letting him become what he could become inside her, a continuing influence on the way she lived.
The shift Seneca was pointing toward is rarely talked about clearly. It runs from grief that wounds to grief that becomes something else. A kind of warm remembering. A way of carrying someone forward that doesn’t require keeping yourself broken on their behalf.
There is only the slow, unforced movement that happens when grief is allowed to do its work without being either crushed or curated.
What does grief actually do, if you let it do its work?
Hierocles gave the Stoics one of their clearest images of human life as relational. The self at the center, then the rings of family, fellow citizens, and finally humanity.
The image was originally a way of thinking about duties and appropriate action, but it points at something deeper. We are not the isolated individuals we sometimes imagine ourselves to be. The configuration of our attention, our care, our daily concern, has always been bound up with the people in those inner rings.
If this is right, and the Stoics were not the only thinkers to suspect it was, then losing someone you loved can feel like losing part of yourself, because part of your life really was shaped around them. The configuration of who you are had become organized partly through them, and now the organization continues in their absence, like a vine continuing to grow in the shape the trellis gave it after the trellis is gone.
This is why grief is the correct response. Something has actually been removed. The grief is your system registering the removal accurately.
But here’s what’s also true, and what the Stoics understood and what much modern grief discourse can flatten. The shaping the person did is still there. The way you notice certain things, the small gestures you picked up without realizing you were picking them up, the values you hold, the particular way you treat someone who needs the kind of care this person once gave you. Some of that is them, still alive in you. Not in the soft sense people sometimes mean when they say someone lives on in our hearts, but in the practical sense that lineage works this way. We carry forward what we received.
The Stoic consolation, if there is one, is this.
The grief is evidence the love was real. The love produced something in you that survives the loss. What survives is what they gave. What they gave is now yours to carry forward, into the way you live, into how you treat the people still here, into who you become from this point on.
This isn’t faster healing, and the loss stays exactly as large as it actually is.
It is a way of refusing two betrayals at once. The grief is permitted, because the love was real. The softening is permitted, because the love continues, in a different form, in you. Both can be true. Holding both is what the Stoics meant by grieving well.
There’s no schedule for this. There never was.
Some readers will be in the part of grief where Seneca's letter to Marcia is exactly the wrong thing to read, because the wound is too fresh and the only honest response is to feel it. If that's you, set this aside. The question Seneca was pressing on Marcia is not the question fresh grief needs.
For readers further along, or carrying an older grief that’s gone quiet but never quite settled, Seneca pointed Marcia toward a harder question. Is the grief still doing its work, or has it become something you’re keeping intact because softening would feel like betrayal?
Seneca’s answer to that question, for Marcia and for anyone since, was that the softening is itself a form of fidelity. To let the wound become warm remembering is not to lose them again. It is to finally let them be inside you the way they were trying to be the whole time. As evidence of what was given, rather than as evidence of what was taken.
What’s left, in the end, is small and specific. A turn of phrase you use that came from them and you didn’t know it came from them. The way you do something small in the kitchen because that’s how they did it. The way you reach for the person beside you when something good happens, because that’s what they taught you to do. The way you treat the next person who needs the kind of care they once gave you.
My grandmother was the kindest person I have ever known. People who only met her once remembered her. Nobody had a bad word about her, not because she was performing kindness, but because there was nothing else in her to perform. She was kind the way water is wet. It was simply what she was made of.
What she gave me, without ever sitting me down to teach it, was the conviction that being kind to people is the most important thing you can do with a life. I don’t always live up to it. I am more impatient and quicker to judge. But she is in me anyway. When I'm patient with someone who needs it, when I stay on the phone longer than I planned, when I give someone the benefit of the doubt, that is her, working through me, four years after she stopped being able to do it herself.
She is the reason I believe what this post has been arguing. That lineage is real. That love produces something durable inside the people who received it. That the dead go on shaping the living, in small daily ways, if the living let them. I am not done grieving her. I don’t think I ever will be entirely. But the grief has become, slowly, a way of carrying her forward rather than a wound I keep dressing.
That is what she would have wanted.
That is what I owe her.
Stay stoic,
SW
Continue reading:
This is how I dealt with the loss of my partner to cancer 9 years ago - stoically. I was criticised as uncaring and fake in my love, when in reality I didnt want it to define me, I wanted it to leave a warmth that allowed me to fondly remember, whenever the moment decided to give me that memory or positive trigger - a song, a colour, a look, a white feather etc. She is always with me, in me, part of me, never forgotten, always loved, just not the definition of who I am and why I exist.
When the tides of grief cease with their ebb and flow and the sea is calm, you remain on the beautiful, perfect beach bathed in the glow of a warm sunset of memories 💖
This passage in the article sums it up :
The shift Seneca was pointing toward is rarely talked about clearly. It runs from grief that wounds to grief that becomes something else. A kind of warm remembering. A way of carrying someone forward that doesn’t require keeping yourself broken on their behalf.
Nothing can prepare you for grief. There are no words that can touch it.