A Valentine’s Day Message on Love and Loss
Remembering with love those we have lost.
A dear family member has suffered much loss this past year and is facing their first Valentine’s Day without their spouse. I feel their pain, so I decided to look for some words of wisdom regarding love and loss. Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius came to mind and did not disappoint.
In “Letter 63—On Grief for Lost Friends,” Seneca addresses the death of Flaccus, a friend of Lucilius. His advice at first sounds harsh, but as you read on you understand that Seneca is not exhorting his friend to not mourn. Instead, he encourages Lucilius to allow the pain to exist for a while, and then let that pain be subsumed by the love you still hold in your heart. Let your memories be comforting instead of painful. In Seneca’s words, “Let us see to it that the recollection of those whom we have lost becomes a pleasant memory to us.”
Seneca quotes his friend Attalus as saying, “The remembrance of lost friends is pleasant in the same way that certain fruits have an agreeably acid taste, or as in extremely old wines it is their very bitterness that pleases us. Indeed, after a certain lapse of time, every thought that gave pain is quenched, and the pleasure comes to us unalloyed.” Seneca goes on to say, “To me, the thought of my dead friends is sweet and appealing. For I have had them as if I should one day lose them; I have lost them as if I have them still.”
This has been key to managing my own grief after the death of my mother. Once I was able to think of Mom as still smiling, still with me, the pain eased. I still talk to her sometimes, silently, as we enjoy certain foods, watch certain shows, or make certain plans. Imagining her joy as we continue to experience this world together makes me smile and laugh sometimes. Yes, occasionally there is still the sharp stab of grief, but more often there is the warm glow of love.
Seneca talks about how society tends to put a limit on mourning periods, and he agrees that these are worthwhile. He has come to believe that chronic grieving is either “assumed or foolish.” And yet, he says, “I must be included among the examples of men who have been overcome by grief.” When a friend younger than himself died, Seneca “wept so excessively” that he now wishes he could have said to himself before then, “My friend Serenus is younger than I; but what does that matter? He would naturally die after me, but he may precede me.” He tells Lucilius that “I had never imagined it possible for his death to precede mine. The only thought which occurred to my mind was that he was the younger, and much younger, too—as if the Fates kept to the order of our ages!”
Seneca ends his letter to Lucilius with this thought: “Now is the time for you to reflect, not only that all things are mortal, but also that their mortality is subject to no fixed law. Whatever can happen at any time can happen to-day. Let us therefore reflect, my beloved Lucilius, that we shall soon come to the goal which this friend, to our own sorrow, has reached. And perhaps, if only the tale told by wise men is true and there is a bourne to welcome us, then he whom we think we have lost has only been sent on ahead. Farewell.”
From Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Letter_63