The philosopher Seneca once tried to comfort a woman who was having a hard time getting over her son’s death.

It’s an interesting letter; he spends nearly 30 pages appealing to cool Stoic reason while also trying to be compassionate. At one point, he tells Marcia (that’s her name), “For, if we were given the choice whether it is preferable to be happy for a short time or never to be happy, it is better for us to have blessings that will depart than to have none at all.” ¹

Then, a few pages later, Seneca tells Marcia this:

“Nothing is so deceptive as the life of a man, nothing is so treacherous: no one, I swear, would have accepted it as a present, if it were not given to us in a state of ignorance. Accordingly, if the greatest fortune is not to be born, the next best, I think, is to die after a short life and be restored to one’s original state.”

So, which of the two is it?

Is it better to love and lose, or to not have been born at all into this bittersweet, sometimes horrifying world? Even if Seneca’s answer is “both,” he glides over one crucial factor: Vulnerability.

No matter how rational, strong, wise, or careful we are, we are fragile and exposed the moment we choose to care about another living creature. Even if it’s a hamster or a budgie. Should we choose to love anyway, knowing we’ll be hurt but not knowing how, when, or to what extent?

And how do we live with that anxiety for the rest of our lives without it consuming us?

There’s No Love Without Fear

Religions and individuals, for millennia, have stepped up to the plate to answer the question, “How do we deal with loss and heartache?” This has given us everything from Buddhism to the Abrahamic religions to absurdism to New Age thinking.

Hannah Arendt, paraphrasing the ancient theologian Saint Augustine, sums up the problem beautifully: “The trouble with human happiness is that it is constantly beset by fear. It is not lack of possession but the safety of possession that is at stake.” ²

Nothing exemplifies this conundrum for me better than the birth of my daughter.

Before she existed, my life was already happy and full. If my life was a house and each person or thing I loved was a room, my home was the size of a Tudor estate. When my daughter was born, it was as if a whole new wing had been built overnight. With this sudden influx of joy and happiness came a strange sort of terror.

The evils of the world weighed on my mind more than usual. I had involuntary thoughts every day of someone stealing her, dropping her, or murdering her. With the euphoric feelings of love that surged through me was a feeling almost as strong: a militant resolve to protect her, even if it meant my own death.

Each time I imagined her gone from my life — though she’d only entered it days before — I couldn’t fathom how I would go on living. Eight months later and counting, the feeling remains. I’ve accepted it’s my fate as a mother to live with this unsettling vulnerability for the rest of my life.³

“You should care about things in a way that makes it a possibility that tragedy will happen to you.”

Saint Augustine and Seneca would probably tell me to put my focus on the only thing that I can’t lose — for Augustine, that’s God, and for Seneca, it’s Virtue. They would tell me, like many others before and since, that attachment leads to pain. “Love, but be careful what you love,” Augustine warns. This “what” includes “who”: even people are dangerous to love. Especially people.

Epictetus, another Stoic philosopher, tries to rectify this problem with the following thought experiment:

When you are kissing your child, or your wife, say to yourself that you are kissing a mortal; for though they are dear to you, yet it is the nature of a human being to die, so that if, even while you are kissing them, they should die, you will not be disturbed. ⁴

What Epictetus may not realize is that I contemplate my daughter’s mortality too often. The “premeditation of evils” is helpful to gain gratitude or perspective, but it can also be a buzzkill. Especially for mothers (and fathers) who are biologically hardwired to make sure they die before their children do.

Epictetus is focused on mitigating the pain, but I’m more interested in exploring and even embracing it as the by-product of deep, intense love. The mystic philosopher Simone Weil notes, “Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling.” ⁵

What if this trembling was a good thing?

Tragedy Makes Us Human

The ancient Greeks were troubled by the problem of luck and our vulnerability to losing the people we love. Playwrights like Aeschylus explore this over and over in grim, ominous tragedies. Is there a lesson in all these stories about people going mad and having their eyes gouged out, or is it just bleak fatalism?

The American philosopher Martha Nussbaum sees a universal lesson in these tales of death and loss. “Tragedy only happens when you are trying to live well,” she says, as opposed to a “heedless person who doesn’t have a deep commitment to others.”  ⁶

Should we protect ourselves by avoiding deep commitments to other people — or values, or hopes? No, argues Nussbaum, because caring about someone or something enough to be stricken by grief, despair, or even madness at losing them is part of what it means to be a good human being. She argues: “You should care about things in a way that makes it a possibility that tragedy will happen to you.”

Does this mean that our friend Seneca is advocating we quash some of our human feelings? I fear he may be, even if he doesn’t mean to. Mourning is natural, “provided it is done in moderation,” he tells Marcia, before going on to talk about different animals that “recover from” losing their babies within a few hours or days. Humans may be animals, but we are not cattle or wild pigs. We carry the memory and the void of those we lose forever. We never go back to who we were before.

Grief and loss are not exclusively negative concepts. Yes, obsessive grief to the point of wallowing is unhealthy. But vulnerability and grief have the power to transform us positively if we allow it. They enlarge our souls and expand our identity.

This positive view of vulnerability, loss, and the deeper humanity it brings is what I see missing from the lectures of Seneca and Epictetus. Even Marcus Aurelius, that gentle sage who lost at least 10 of his 14 beloved children, focuses on strength and inner control over richness and human intimacy. It’s possible that the Stoics took vulnerability for granted because they lived in a time when graphic death and tragedy were common. I get it. If your default experience is pain, it makes sense to focus on control and inner strength.

The danger is when this desire for control leads us to immunize ourselves from love, feeling, and vulnerability. I’ve known people who rationalize not owning a dog for this reason — they know they will almost certainly outlive it, and they don’t want to experience the sorrow. They reject both the certainty of loss and the certainty of joy. 

The 20th-century writer C.S. Lewis, no stranger to tragedy himself, offers up this stinging rebuttal to the austerity of Saint Augustine and the temptation to avoid emotional attachment:

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation.” ⁷

I hope my daughter outlives me. I hope that the losses I face won’t be so severe that I will go half-mad, like Hecuba or Oedipus. We can’t avoid tragedy in this life, but we can choose to embrace it as a part of being a complete human. And in the meantime, however fleeting it is, we can choose to love and tremble. And to not be careful whom we love or how much.

It is a risk, for sure, but it’s better than damnation.

***

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1. Seneca, L. A., Davie, J., & Reinhardt, T. (2009). Dialogues and essays. Oxford University Press.
2. Arendt, H., Scott, J. V., & Stark, J. C. (2014). Love and Saint Augustine. The University of Chicago Press.
3. For this reason I find that Seneca can’t help but mansplain just a little bit when he’s trying to comfort Marcia; he is not a mother.
4. From Discourses (3.24.84).
5. From Gravity and Grace.
6. In an interview with Bill Moyer here
7. Lewis, C. S. (2017). The Four Loves. HarperOne.