Today is the two-year anniversary of the death of an animal companion who was very close to me. She was a cat, and her name was Sassy, but like many beloved animals she wound up with a whole bunch of other names instead. But this isn't really about that! What I wanted to talk about were some reflections from Seneca, the great Stoic philosopher, about grieving and memory and friendship.
And this may seem a little incongruous to some, the fact that I'm going to use a cat as a prime example here, because you might say, ah, you know, they're just dumb animals. They're not human beings. They're not persons. And that's certainly true that they're not rational agents in the same degree as we are, but I think you can say that there's a lot more going on, at least in some animal life, than many philosophers, particularly in the past, accounted for. So they're not rational in the same way that we are, but they certainly do have and act on and show emotions and they have desires and they engage us. And we can form bonds with at least certain animals.
And that was the case for me and Sassy. She was the animal companion that I have been closest to in my entire life. We knew each other for 12 of her 19 and a half years and spent an awful lot of time together. She came to trust me as her whatever you want to call it companion. cat daddy, her person. And she'd even go around looking for me when I wasn't home and use a special little cry that my wife would sometimes try to record and would tell me about later on. So Sassy was very important to me and I was very important to Sassy.
Her end came as it typically does with a lot of older animals with not a complete steady decline except at the end, but she would decline a bit and then she would rally, but it was never quite as strong or high the rally compared to where she'd been before. And so what we observed were several years of slowly becoming less mobile, slowly having more troubles with her body. And towards the end, the decline was actually pretty quick.
I spent three days constantly with her, sleeping beside her, trying to get her to eat, helping her to use the litter box when she was still doing so. And in the end, just comforting her and holding her. So as far as animals go, she had a good death. She went out surrounded by people who loved her, comforting her, petting her, telling her that she was loved and was a good girl.
And then, as is so often the case with loss, you're left behind. And what do you do? Well, Seneca wrote about something like this to Lucilius, starting by saying, “I'm sorry your friend Flaccus has passed away, but I want you not to grieve excessively.
And he tells him, not grieving at all, that would be extraordinary and I'm not going to ask that of you. And then he gives him a number of bits of advice and rules and principles to use.
The one that I particularly like is where he tells his friend: “Let us try to make the memory of those who are gone a pleasant one. If the thought brings torment, one does not willingly return to it, and so here we are bound to feel abiding when the names of loved ones come to mind, but even this has its own pleasure."
And then he brings up his friend Attalus, who used to say about this: “the memory of friends who have died gives a pleasure like that of apples that are both tart and sweet, or like the pleasing acidity of an old wine. After a time, though, all that pains us is extinguished and only the pleasure remains.”
Seneca goes on and says: “if we're to believe him, thinking of friends safe and sound is cakes and honey, remembering those who have gone is bittersweet. Yet who would deny that sharp and even bitter flavors are sometimes to our taste?”
Seneca then says: “my experience is different. To me, the thought of friends who have died is sweet, even comforting. For when I had friends, I had them as one who would lose them. Now that I have lost them, I am as one who still has them.”
Now, that is a very interesting idea, is it not, that you can retain your connection to the lost, the missing, or the dead friend, the one who you feel affection towards and who felt affection towards you, goodwill, perhaps even love of some sort. Seneca is one of many philosophers over the years who have talked about keeping something of the other person within yourself through the function of memory.
Now the question is: How does it feel? Seneca is a good Stoic. He thinks that pain or trouble or grief is not a good thing in itself. It's actually a bad thing for us to feel, but it's also something that's quite natural for us to feel. And so he's not going to say don't try to feel or express any of it.
But when we're remembering those who we have lost, once the loss is past us, we don't always have to be grieving. We don't always have to feel bad or bereft or unhappy. We don't have to feel sad about them. We have the choice about what we're going to remember. And this is the thing that I really take from this letter, and I think perhaps it could be useful for anyone else who wants to apply it.
Attalus and Seneca, who is recalling him to mind and bringing him up as advice for his friend, Lachilius, are using, we could say, gustatory metaphors. They're talking about sweetness. They're talking about bitterness. They actually are also talking about acerbity or sourness and something that we can translate as roughness or austerity. And all of these are tastes that can go together.
And our memories metaphorically can be expressed as having these sorts of qualities or tendencies to them. So we can have a bitter memory. We can have a sweet memory. We can have a sour memory. We can have a salty memory, although Seneca doesn't use all of those terms here. And it's up to us what we want to focus on.
We can think about how unfortunate it is for us that we are deprived of the presence and the engagement with the person or the companion who we were so close to and enjoyed spending time with, or we can think about that time. We can think about that enjoyment. We can consider what it was that we loved about them.
There's nothing that says we can't keep on thinking about that and remembering that and turning it over in our mind. In the case of Sassy, there are myriad things that I think about. The walks that we took outside together here in Milwaukee, going outside in the yard together in Kingston, spending time curled up together, how she used to jump up in my lap and go to sleep or sometimes try to sample the food that I was eating.She was very food motivated, that cat.
And with anybody who we're involved with for a long time, we can call up similar memories and we can think about what was good in those. What did we feel joy in What did we desire and then find fulfilled as a desire? What did we go through together? What experiences did we share?
We exercise our faculty of memory, and this can be done in quite deliberate ways. This is incredibly powerful and liberating. And we can do this not just with people or companions who have passed away. We can do this with people who somehow got left behind in all of our travels or moves or who left us behind. Any of the things that are good in our memory, there's nothing that stands in the way other than our own ideas about it to keep us from calling them up and enjoying them.
So I find this very useful to think about, to remind myself of, to bring into my memory, you could say, if we want to get a little bit meta here.Maybe it will be equally useful for you.
The last thing that I'll say is one thing the Stoics consistently tell us about grief is that although we are going to grieve, we don't need to tell ourselves that the bad feelings that we have are the sign of whether we truly love the person or not. Those are two separate things. The love can go on long after the grief has worn itself out or we've set it aside.
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