Seneca, Moral Letters 30.2

This is a great accomplishment, Lucilius, and one which needs long practice to learn—to depart calmly when the inevitable hour arrives. 

 

Other kinds of death contain an ingredient of hope: a disease comes to an end; a fire is quenched; falling houses have set down in safety those whom they seemed certain to crush; the sea has cast ashore unharmed those whom it had engulfed, by the same force through which it drew them down; the soldier has drawn back his sword from the very neck of his doomed foe. 

 

But those whom old age is leading away to death have nothing to hope for; old age alone grants no reprieve. No ending, to be sure, is more painless; but there is none more lingering. 

 

Our friend Bassus seemed to me to be attending his own funeral, and laying out his own body for burial, and living almost as if he had survived his own death, and bearing with wise resignation his grief at his own departure. 

 

For he talks freely about death, trying hard to persuade us that if this process contains any element of discomfort or of fear, it is the fault of the dying person, and not of death itself; also, that there is no more inconvenience at the actual moment than there is after it is over.

 

"And it is just as insane," he adds, "for a man to fear what will not happen to him, as to fear what he will not feel if it does happen." Or does anyone imagine it to be possible that the agency by which feeling is removed can be itself felt? "Therefore," says Bassus, "death stands so far beyond all evil that it is beyond all fear of evils." 

—from Seneca, Moral Letters 30  

 

It is right for it to pass, as it isn’t meant for what I am to continue; who I am has already been decided. I have determined it for this second, and the next second, if it comes, will also be of my choosing. 

 

Over the years, I have noticed how I dally too long. I grow attached to a person, a place, or a thing, and so I wish to experience it over and over, even after its time has come and gone. I am inevitably disappointed when the people leave, or the places change, or the things fall apart, and this can easily become an unhealthy aspect of my disposition to nostalgia. 

 

I was that fellow who didn’t want the party to end, or haunted the old café, or was always waiting for her to come back around the corner. I am learning to remember without clinging. 

 

It is one thing for me to find pleasure in a situation, quite another for me to become enslaved to the situation, addicted to an external arrangement as a substitute for an inner repose. It is a sign of maturity to keep a goodbye from turning into a tragic play. 

 

There can be a danger in bearing one loss by an expectation of some other gain, since I am inclined to only pass the buck of my dependence. A meditation upon death can help to avoid this temptation, by providing a clear limit to what this life will give me, and thus encouraging me to focus on the excellence of my own thoughts and deeds, right here and now. 

 

So Bassus can practice self-reliance when he does not define the value of his life by what may or may not come down the line. He is calm about his impending death because he does not judge it a threat to either his identity or his happiness. He speaks lightly of it in the same way I might speak lightly of the weather, being something of interest while not making or breaking me. 

 

If I am not willing to honestly examine what it means to die, my end will still be terrifying on account of being hidden and unknown. There are times when avoiding an unpleasantness or speaking in hushed voices about the mysterious does me no favors. I can choose to discuss dying as casually as I can make my plans for lunch. 

 

When considered in and of itself, casting aside all the associations and assumptions, death is only as frightening as I make it. I am certain, by definition, that any pain during the actual event will quickly pass, being no more agonizing than anything I have already experienced, and then after the event I will, also by definition, have no possibility of worrying about it. 

 

Indeed, think of how silly it sounds to say I am tortured about a state where any awareness, as I now know it, will cease completely. What can be felt where there is no feeling? Where nothing is, there is no fear, and no evil to befall me. The misery is in my own head. 

—Reflection written in 11/2012