“If you have lost a son, you have only ceased to hold him; you have not lost him. He is beyond all harm… Nature lends us children not as possessions, but as gifts that must be returned.”
The two most personal letters that Seneca wrote were to his mother, after he had been exiled to Corsica, and to Marcia, who had just lost her son. In both, he consoles a mother who is overwhelmed by grief. No parent should ever lose a child, or have them taken so far away that they may never see them again.
To Marcia, he gives a bracing, almost fierce call to break grief’s stranglehold. He tells her not by denying pain, but also recognise that the dead are beyond suffering, given the release nature grants all things, and that endless mourning dishonours the life she loved.
To his mother Helvia, torn apart by her son’s absence and public disgrace, Seneca consoles her with the fact that exile is no great burden, and she has always been a model of virtue and strength; that his two brothers are still there, and his adopted child needs her.
Written with his classic style, but a strong dose of pathos and sympathy that is often missing from his more abstract ruminations, these are letters from a son, a friend, a fellow sufferer, who is determined to heal wounds he knows firsthand. They overflow with a mix of grit and tenderness, as Seneca shows that grief, when met with reason and love, can transform into a deep, unshakeable memory, and that even the most crushing loss can become the ground on which a sturdier self is built.
