Stoic Friday LVIII

1. I am grieved to hear that your friend Flaccus is dead, but I would not have you sorrow more than is fitting. That you should not mourn at all I shall hardly dare to insist; and yet I know that it is the better way. But what man will ever be so blessed with that ideal steadfastness of soul, unless he has already risen far above the reach of Fortune? Even such a man will be stung by an event like this, but it will be only a sting. We, however, may be forgiven for bursting into tears, if only our tears have not flowed to excess, and if we have checked them by our own efforts. Let not the eyes be dry when we have lost a friend, nor let them overflow. We may weep, but we must not wail.

She had been fighting cancer for the last 4 years, so her dying was not a shock. While we all knew she probably would not live much longer, the end came more quickly than any of us would have guessed. My Stepdad, Bob, called me Tuesday morning and said she was in the hospital and probably had days left to live. While I was getting ready to drive to Raleigh to pick up my son before heading to PA, he called again and said that it looked pretty grim. A couple hours later he called and was barely able to say, “It’s done” and then he hung up. While I was sad I didn’t get to talk to her one more time, I was glad she wasn’t suffering anymore. This thought helped immensely in dealing with everything.

2. Do you think that the law which I lay down for you is harsh, when the greatest of Greek poets has extended the privilege of weeping to one day only, in the lines where he tells us that even Niobe took thought of food?^[1] Do you wish to know the reason for lamentations and excessive weeping? It is because we seek the proofs of our bereavement in our tears, and do not give way to sorrow, but merely parade it. No man goes into mourning for his own sake. Shame on our ill-timed folly! There is an element of self-seeking even in our sorrow.

I got home on Wednsday and my brothers and I were able to keep ourself and Bob in good spirits by recalling funny stories about her, but he was hurting worse than we were. I am OK with my mom dying, it is part of life sucking sometimes, but have no idea how I will handle my wife dying.

3. “What,” you say, “am I to forget my friend?” It is surely a short-lived memory that you vouchsafe to him, if it is to endure only as long as your grief; presently that brow of yours will be smoothed out in laughter by some circumstance, however casual. It is to a time no more distant than this that I put off the soothing of every regret, the quieting of even the bitterest grief. As soon as you cease to observe yourself, the picture of sorrow which you have contemplated will fade away; at present you are keeping watch over your own suffering. But even while you keep watch it slips away from you, and the sharper it is, the more speedily it comes to an end.

My mom and I did not have the best relationship, she could be a very angry and nasty woman on occasion, but overall we got along pretty well. I never felt the urge to really cry, my brother felt the same way, but my half brother was a wreck.

4. Let us see to it that the recollection of those whom we have lost becomes a pleasant memory to us. No man reverts with pleasure to any subject which he will not be able to reflect upon without pain. So too it cannot but be that the names of those whom we have loved and lost come back to us with a sort of sting; but there is a pleasure even in this sting.

We did all have good memories of mom that we shared, just a week before she died they all went to a Penguins game, and she had a blast on her new scooter after fighting for years not to get one even though she could hardly walk. She always said about scooters, “You’ll never get me on one. You always see people riding them and they are always old and fat.” Then she gave me and my brother a dirty look because our thoughts were obvious and said, “I know!” Or the time on vacation when she wanted to drive the pontoon boat and almost took out the dock at the ice cream place, so we never let her drive again.

5. For, as my friend Attalus^[2] used to say: “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.” 6. If we take the word of Attalus for it, “to think of friends who are alive and well is like enjoying a meal of cakes and honey; the recollection of friends who have passed away gives a pleasure that is not without a touch of bitterness. Yet who will deny that even these things, which are bitter and contain an element of sourness, do serve to arouse the stomach?” 7. For my part, I do not agree with him. 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.

I don’t really have bitterness from her dying. She had uterine cancer that traveled to her breast after they thought chemo had gotten rid of it. They did surgery on that with chemo and a few months later she had a new tumor in her armpit. They said that another round of chemo would not be an option, so they had her on drugs and that led to a skin reaction. To fight the skin reaction, they took her off the drugs and gave her a steroid cream. Bob thinks this caused her stomach cancer to grow rapidly and killed her.

Therefore, Lucilius, act as befits your own serenity of mind, and cease to put a wrong interpretation on the gifts of Fortune. Fortune has taken away, but Fortune has given. 8. Let us greedily enjoy our friends, because we do not know how long this privilege will be ours. Let us think how often we shall leave them when we go upon distant journeys, and how often we shall fail to see them when we tarry together in the same place; we shall thus understand that we have lost too much of their time while they were alive. 9. But will you tolerate men who are most careless of their friends, and then mourn them most abjectly, and do not love anyone unless they have lost him? The reason why they lament too unrestrainedly at such times is that they are afraid lest men doubt whether they really have loved; all too late they seek for proofs of their emotions. 10. If we have other friends, we surely deserve ill at their hands and think ill of them, if they are of so little account that they fail to console us for the loss of one. If, on the other hand, we have no other friends, we have injured ourselves more than Fortune has injured us; since Fortune has robbed us of one friend, but we have robbed ourselves of every friend whom we have failed to make. 11. Again, he who has been unable to love more than one, has had none too much love even for that one.^[3] If a man who has lost his one and only tunic through robbery chooses to bewail his plight rather than look about him for some way to escape the cold, or for something with which to cover his shoulders, would you not think him an utter fool?

“Fortune has taken away, but Fortune has given”

Her first marriage to my dad was very unhappy, so I am glad she married Bob and they were married 38 years. While she still had some nastiness in her, it was greatly mellowed by having a happy marriage.

You have buried one whom you loved; look about for someone to love. It is better to replace your friend than to weep for him.

While I can’t exactly replace my mom, instead of calling her monthly, I will try to call Bob weekly. He was a good stepdad to a bunch of asshole kids that weren’t happy their world had been turned upside down in the last 6 months. He was a wreck at the funeral and we are all worried about how he handles life by himself.

12. What I am about to add is, I know, a very hackneyed remark, but I shall not omit it simply because it is a common phrase: A man ends his grief by the mere passing of time, even if he has not ended it of his own accord. But the most shameful cure for sorrow, in the case of a sensible man, is to grow weary of sorrowing. I should prefer you to abandon grief, rather than have grief abandon you; and you should stop grieving as soon as possible, since, even if you wish to do so, it is impossible to keep it up for a long time. 13. Our forefathers^[4] have enacted that, in the case of women, a year should be the limit for mourning; not that they needed to mourn for so long, but that they should mourn no longer. In the case of men, no rules are laid down, because to mourn at all is not regarded as honorable. For all that, what woman can you show me, of all the pathetic females that could scarcely be dragged away from the funeral-pile or torn from the corpse, whose tears have lasted a whole month? Nothing becomes offensive so quickly as grief; when fresh, it finds someone to console it and attracts one or another to itself; but after becoming chronic, it is ridiculed, and rightly. For it is either assumed or foolish.

Mourning is a natural part of life. I really was not looking forward to the funeral where I had to see a bunch of people I barely knew and didn’t really like many of them.  It was good to see some of the people that showed up and some not so much. Her whole side of the family was once described by an uncle that married into it: “That family just walks in a cicle in a room with a pile of shit in the middle and every once in a while, one of them will go and stir it up”.

14. He who writes these words to you is no other than I, who wept so excessively for my dear friend Annaeus Serenus^[5] that, in spite of my wishes, I must be included among the examples of men who have been overcome by grief. To-day, however, I condemn this act of mine, and I understand that the reason why I lamented so greatly was chiefly 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!

While my mom dying was a sad event, it felt like it was OK for her to be finished fighting.  It is easier to deal with a death that’s expected than one that comes out of nowhere and seems unfair.

15. Therefore let us continually think as much about our own mortality as about that of all those we love. In former days I ought to have said: “My friend Serenus is younger than I; but what does that matter? He would naturally die after me, but he may precede me.” It was just because I did not do this that I was unprepared when Fortune dealt me the sudden blow. 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. 16. 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^[6] and there is a bourne to welcome us, then he whom we think we have lost has only been sent on ahead. Farewell.

While I didn’t have a breakdown or anything, it is hard to accept she is dead. Sitting in the house with my brothers and Bob, the fact that she did most of the talking with all of us was very obvious. While I am not religious, my wife is, and she is happy my mom was a Christian and she says we’ll all be together someday. I really hope I am wrong, and she is right on that one.