TL;DR
This article/story is in two parts. The first part, immediately below, is an article I wrote and published about my dog Ezri in the context of Stoic philosophy. I had no idea when I was writing it how prescient it was. At the end of the article, I have just written an update.
I hope in sharing this story, you are moved, even the slightest, as it has moved me in writing it.
It has been an emotional journey and this is an emotional story.
WARNING: Topics and discussion of death, dying, SUICIDE, loss, and grief. Please adjust YOURSELF accordingly.
I was getting my dog daughter, Ezri, ready for her afternoon walk when a profound bittersweet sense of love and appreciation washed over me. I was kneeling down on the kitchen floor with her harness, guiding her paws into it (we do this 3,4,5 times a day and she still likes to pretend she doesn’t know what to do) and when I looked back up we were at eye level and looking at each other.
Ezri has black hair with some terrier qualities and her face is a little small, with a pointy snoot and tiny chin underneath. Ezri is a “special needs” dog. Many of her teeth are missing, possibly from a congenital disorder, and her oversized tongue is almost always hanging out in a perpetual blep. Don’t worry; she has no problems eating. In fact, she is incredibly surgical and practical with her gums (we jokingly call them her Gummy Bears, and when she’s giving us the business I like to imagine her saying, “You came for the Gummies but you’re gonna get the Bears!”)
Part of her lower vertebrae are fused (she has no problems getting around) and while it doesn’t give her pain, she has to be handled very particularly or it can. She experienced arthritis later, but it was well-managed and meant that I had to take my bed off the frame and place it on the floor so she could jump up to continue hogging the covers and pushing me to the edge.
Ezri lost her left eye to cancer, but we caught it pretty early and tests show no sign of metastasis, so I count that as a win. Because of this, though, I’ve become sensitive to small changes in her behavior or appearance. I keep a high situational awareness of her well-being, but this doesn’t really feel like any effort because, well, I love her.
Now, I feel like I should explain what I mean when I say that, I’m not referring to her name and form: Ezri as a female dog. She’s a living being — like me — and while being in a dog body and having dog nature, the way I see it, it is not different from what I am with human nature in a human body. Everyone has their own beliefs (or not), but for me, this is axiomatic and undeniable. Knowing this, however, for narrative purposes, I’ll continue to follow the convention of her being a dog and me being a human. I’m glad we got that out of the way. *grin*
Kneeling down this way with her harness, her little snoot was next to my face and our eyes were mere inches apart. We both had our attention on each other and held each other’s gaze for a few moments. I briefly looked away then back at her and then she did the same. I laughed and gave her a smooch on the moochies.
My attention came to rest on her gray hairs, standing out against their black background, that speckled her upper lip and chin. They were just little islands of silver tufts the last I really noticed but today they are widespread and connected, a little silver fan spreading out from her chin down her neck.
We are always complaining that our days are few, and acting as though there would be no end of them. — Seneca
I am glad we are able to share our time together, but there will come a morning when there will be no paws to step through her harness, no more kisses, no more experiencing and sharing our lives with each other. It’s hard to think about; the mind just wants to push it away to deal with later (or not at all).
While typing that, I could feel physiological responses in my body, even though I am intellectually aware of death’s inevitability, and don’t confuse the falling away of the body with anything permanent, there was a foreboding, dark, churning pit in my stomach.
And here, I feel a further (brief) explanation is owed and this will be as candid as it is uncomfortable. But if it helps anyone else see they’re not struggling alone, it’s worth it to me. I’ve struggled with PTSD for over a decade. After a few years of failed drug trials, intolerable symptoms, insane freaking side-effects, and treatment resistance, I didn’t feel safe anywhere, and stopped leaving my house, became non-functioning, eventually suicidal.
If you are struggling with thoughts of hurting yourself, it’s OK to share your feelings or ask for help. Dial 911 or 988, Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. Veterans can SMS 838255
Somewhere in the midst of that, Ezri and Dexter were rescued in Kansas and appeared at our local shelter. I had lost my beloved Wilderness First Responder (WFR) dog, Davis, two years before and I resisted, but animals have a way of working on you even when you are unaware of it.
I could write an entire different article on this, but suffice it to say that Ezri and Dexter and I spent 24/7 with each other for the better part of a decade, particularly when Trump came on the political scene, my mental health took a nosedive, and we were really each others support animal (Dexter came with severe, almost crippling, anxiety at times and was diagnosed with his own case of PTSD — yep, it’s real, and yep, it’s treatable), with me being the trained Homo (sapien). Ok, ‘nuff said.
I know not having her in my daily life and adjusting my schedule to her absence, it is natural to struggle while absorbing it. Grieving is important — both psychologically and biologically — and recognizing death for what it is (or is not) isn’t a prophylactic for grief; it will still be experienced, but one might not have to suffer.
As a society, we don’t really talk about death. When we do, our stories and beliefs around it tend to be based on religious and superstitious attempts at explanation or extortion. Philosophy can help here1, and during an undergraduate course on ethics I discovered the Stoics, their particular view of life, death, and eternity, and their "death awareness" practice called Memento mori.
Stoicism and Memento Mori
A Brief Background
Stoicism was founded in the 3rd century BCE by Zeno of Citium and was one of the four Hellenistic schools of philosophy (the others being Epicureanism, Skepticism, and Cynicism). The terms stoic and stoicism come from the Greek word stoa (porch) where the earliest teachers held their discussions.
From Athens, it came to Rome and thrived under the Roman senator Seneca the Younger, the teacher Musonius Rufus, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, and the slave and teacher, Epictetus. It remained the dominant philosophy for around five centuries until the Christian Byzantine Emperor Justinian I closed the schools in 529 CE.2
Stoicism influenced Christianity3, as well as several significant historical philosophical figures, such as Augustine, Leibniz, Kant, Spinoza, and Descartes4. It experienced a revival in the late 20th century, and in the early 21st century saw its practical philosophy associated with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy5, among others. It remains a relevant philosophy today.
Formally, Stoicism is a kind of eudaimonic virtue ethics predicated, at least in part, upon Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics6, and as such, functions to help the practitioner live, using logic and reason, and according to nature, a good or happy life (eudaimonia, loosely, this has had numerous interpretations) of virtue while navigating the vagaries of life and death.
Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now, take what’s left and live it properly. What doesn’t transmit light creates its own darkness.
On death and dying
Death, to the Stoics, was a natural process that completed an ephemeral, ever-changing life, and because death comes to all of us without exception it should be accepted without fear. When death arrives, it is illogical to fear it, as nothing is more natural than death.
The Roman philosopher, humorist, Roman statesman, and instructor to notorious Roman Emperor Nero, Lucius Annaeus Seneca, or just Seneca the Younger, about meditating on, and preparing for, death, wrote,
“The final hour when we cease to exist does not itself bring death; it merely of itself completes the death process…we have been a long time on the way.”
“We are dying everyday.”
“Life, if well lived, is long enough.”
“No man enjoys the true taste of life, but he who is ready and willing to quit it.”
“Life itself is slavery if the courage to die be absent.”
Epictetus, who, being born into slavery, endured this with his Stoic philosophy, and whose contribution to the corpus of Stoic teachings cannot be overstated, wrote:
“I must die. Must I then die lamenting? I must be put in chains. Must I then also lament? I must go into exile. Does any man then hinder me from going with smiles and cheerfulness and contentment?”
“I cannot escape death, but at least I can escape the fear of it.”
“What upsets people is not things themselves but their judgments about the things. For example, death is nothing dreadful…but instead the judgement about death that it is dreadful — that is what is dreadful.” “Death and pain are not frightening, it’s the fear of pain and death we need to fear.”
Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor (161-180 CE) and Stoic philosopher, last emperor of the relatively peaceful period known as the Pax Romana, and the last of the so-called Five Good Emperors, in his classic Stoic reflection on life, The Meditations, wrote:
“Don’t look down on death, but welcome it. It too is one of the things required by nature. Like youth and old age. Like growth and maturity. Like a new set of teeth, a beard, the first gray hair. Like sex and pregnancy and childbirth. Like all the other physical changes at each stage of life, our dissolution is no different. So this is how a thoughtful person should await death: not with indifference, not with impatience, not with disdain, but simply viewing it as one of the things that happen to us.“ Meditations 9.3
“Stop whatever you’re doing for a moment and ask yourself: Am I afraid of death because I won’t be able to do this anymore?” Meditations. 10.29
Seneca and Marcus Aurelius both talk about the need to die with dignity and they define this as accepting the necessity and going willingly into that “black implacable wall of death,” and to not lament a life lost, or try to hold on or resist what, by necessity, must happen. They taught death is not waiting for us at the end of our life, but it is already upon us.
According to Stoics, logos, or the rational ordering of the cosmos, ensured certain necessities, eventualities, or imperatives; natural and universal laws that are immutable. A life well-lived, say the Stoics, must include dying well, and this means dying with a calm, accepting grace, and not like someone being thrown out of a house.
Seneca in Letter 54 of Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, writes,
The man, though, whom you should admire and imitate is the one who finds it a joy to live and in spite of that is not reluctant to die. For where's the virtue in going out when you're really being thrown out? And yet there is this virtue about my case: I'm in the process of being thrown out, certainly, but the manner of it is as if I were going out.
And the reason why it never happens to a wise man is that being thrown out signifies expulsion from a place one is reluctant to depart from, and there is nothing the wise man does reluctantly.
He escapes necessity because he wills what necessity is going to force on him.
This idea that one can escape necessity, that is, death, by willing the inevitable to be so, and thus rejecting death’s power, has found its way through Western history by turning up in the thoughts and writings of prominent thinkers, philosophers, and theologians, although the Roman Catholic Church had its own traditions of memento mori through the centuries.
Death is not an evil. What is it then?
The one law mankind has that is free of all discrimination.
On loss
When a loved one dies, the Stoics tell us, they are returning from whence they came, from whence you came and to where you will go, and therefore shouldn’t be a mournful event but a happy, celebratory one.
“Never say about anything, “I have lost it,” but instead, “I have given it back.” Did your child die? It was given back. Did your wife die? She was given back.“ —Epictetus, Handbook 11
We have to keep in mind the state of affairs and quality of life experienced ~2000 years ago. Life expectancy was low, infant mortality was high. Life could be particularly cruel and short, and if you made it to adulthood you had probably seen most of your family die — from disease, famine, or violence — along with many people you knew. If you made it to 35 congratulations, you’re doing better than the people in Logan’s Run!
While Life was feasting at your table, Death was sleeping in your bed. It hung over everyone. Living close to the earth, the cycle of life and death was not far off from anyone’s mind, unlike how we modern humans go to great lengths to avoid discussing — or even thinking about — death.
Death is equal opportunity
The Stoics kept reminding us that death is indiscriminate, it affects the lowest and the highest, the Prince and the pauper, and takes equally from all. It is the great equalizer. We have a sense of this with the saying, “After the game, the King and the Pawn go into the same box.”
Marcus Aurelius, who had seen his share of violent military campaigns, and who knew death and dying intimately, wrote about what death takes from us:
“The longest-lived and those who will die soonest lose the same thing. The sole thing of which any of us can be deprived is the present, since that is all you have, and what you do not have, you cannot lose.” Meditations 2.14
Seneca, famous for his particular epistolary style of condolence letters, wrote,
“Death is not an evil. What is it then? The one law mankind has that is free of all discrimination.”
“Death has no degrees of greater or less; for it has the same limit in all instances, the finishing of life.“
The Stoics were well aware that when we die, regardless of what we claimed in life — wealth, things, titles, knowledge — death will take equally from all of us, and in so doing, shows us the waste of a life of pursuing objects and externals.
I ask you, wouldn't you say that anyone who took the view that a lamp was worse off when it was put out than it was before it was lit was an utter idiot?
We, too, are lit and put out. We suffer somewhat in the intervening period, but at either end of it there is a deep tranquillity.
The before- and afterlife
Because none of us can know (we are free to believe whatever we like) what lies beyond death, it doesn’t make sense to be scared of it. In fact, reason tells us, according to the Stoics, that what happens after death must be the same as what happens before birth.
“What is death? A scary mask. Take it off – see, it doesn’t bite. Eventually, body and soul will have to separate, just as they existed separately before we were born. So why be upset if it happens now? If it isn’t now, it’s later.” — Epictetus
The Stoics believed death is simply the absence of being, the negation of existence.
Seneca, writing extensively on the subject, thought that after his death he will be what he was before his life: nothing. He reasons if there was to be torment after life there must have been torment before life, yet we are not conscious of it7.
“Ignorant people see life as either existence or non-existence, but wise men see it beyond both existence and non-existence to something that transcends them both; this is an observation of the Middle Way.” —Seneca
“You can discard most of the junk that clutters your mind — things that exist only there. And you will immediately make vast space for yourself by grasping the whole universe in your thought, by contemplating the eternity of time, and by reflecting on the speed with which things change — each part of everything, the brief gap from birth to death, the infinite time before, and the equally infinite time that follows.” —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 9.32
As a philosophy meant to be practiced and applied to everyday living , Stoicism provides many useful concepts and practices. One of the later traditions of the Roman Stoics is memento mori.
“Remember, thou art mortal.”
In the Latin phrase Memento mori (mə-MEN-toh MOR-ee), memento is the active imperative of meminī, 'to remember, to bear in mind', usually serving as a warning: "remember!" and so serves as a reminder or an admonishment to “remember death,” or “remember that you die.”
This "death awareness" is an ancient Western practice that goes back to Socrates, where Plato describes his death and brings in this idea that the proper practice of philosophy is about “nothing else but dying and being dead.”8
The purpose and practice of memento mori was not to obsess on, or instill the fear of, death but to inspire living a life of meaning and virtue now, in the present, because the present is all we have and the next moment is not guaranteed9.
“Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day.” —Seneca
“You could leave this life at any moment: have this possibility in your mind in all that you do or say or think.” —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2.11
“Don’t behave as if you are destined to live forever. Death hangs over you. While you live, while it is in your power, be good. Now.”—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 4.17
“Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now, take what’s left and live it properly. What doesn’t transmit light creates its own darkness.” —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 7.56
Memento mori urges us to perform our duties without wasting time and be ready to leave life when death arrives. It reminds us how worthless our earthly belongings are and how precious time, and what you do with it, really is.
Discussion
If any of this already sounds familiar, you are probably not mistaken. Many of these ideas are echoed in the cultural zeitgeist.
In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Act II, Scene 2, he has Caesar saying,
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard.
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.
There is a saying in French:
“En face de la mort, on comprend mieux la vie.”
In the face of death, we understand life better.
It is in our final hour that it all becomes too clear. This French quote urges us to seek clarity on the true nature of self before it gets to that point.
Many people, arguably not practitioners of Stoicism, have expressed these Stoic-like ideas. Here are just a few that express varying levels of complexity or nuance in thought or philosophy on the subject:
“All who have died are equal.” — Sylvia Browne
“It is not the end of the physical body that should worry us. Rather, our concern must be to live while we're alive - to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are.“ — Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.” — Mark Twain
“Fear of death is ridiculous because as long as you are not dead you are alive, and when you are dead there is nothing more to worry about.” — Paramahansa Yogananda
“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it, and that is how it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.” — Steve Jobs
“If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character… Would you slow down? Or speed up?” — Chuck Palahniuk
He who swallows a complete coconut has absolute trust in his anus. — Zulu Kanga
“When your time comes to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home.“ — Tecumseh
Of course, the West doesn’t have exclusive claim to death awareness practices. Far from it!
The Sanskrit māraṇam मारण (Pali maraṇa), translated as “death,” can refer to the end of life or the cessation of mental or physical experience. It is an aspect of dukkha (suffering) within the teachings of the Four Noble Truths.
The Maraṇasati (mindfulness of death, death awareness) is a Buddhist meditation practice that uses various visualization and contemplation techniques to meditate on the nature of death and its cultivation, it is said, is conducive to right effort and helps develop a sense of spiritual urgency10.
Particularly, it is quite common in South East Asian Buddhist sangha to find these mindfulness of death practices. Just as Seneca and Marcus Aurelius urged us to do what must be done now and not put it off for life is uncertain, Theravada Buddhism, according to the Maranasati Sutta, says the monk should reflect on the many ways in which death may come and then urgently turn one's attention to one's qualities that have yet to be abandoned11.
In Tibetan Buddhism, mindfulness of death is a central tenet and is found as one of the Four Thoughts that "turn the mind toward spiritual practice." A particular set of contemplations from the 11th century Buddhist scholar Atisha12 express several concepts of memento mori to such a degree that one might be excused for thinking Marcus Aurelius had a hand in its writing:
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Death is inevitable
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Our life span is decreasing continuously
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Death will come, whether or not we are prepared for it
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Human life expectancy is uncertain
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There are many causes of death
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The human body is fragile and vulnerable
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At the time of death, our material resources are not of use to us
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Our loved ones cannot keep us from death
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Our own body cannot help us at the time of death
I could go on, but I would be going further out of scope. I’ll save it for another time. You can let me know in the comments if you’d like to read more about these topics.
Conclusion
Frank and honest discussion around death and dying — not necessarily meaning instructions after you die, which we call one’s “last wishes” — is not the norm for American families. We inculcate our children about death usually through the viewpoint and framework of a religion, although new generations are trending more toward the secular.
The Stoics believed that everything in life is temporary, that we can enjoy but must be willing to give up everything, and that includes our relationships with other beings. The Stoics embraced relationships, even though they understood their impermanence, and in spite of it, deeply valued them. They also felt we shouldn’t mourn the death of loved ones, but instead celebrate their life that they shared with us. Stoicism wants to remind us that death is not a loss, but a natural return to the cosmos13.
The Stoic principle of memento mori is a reminder of our mortality, that we are all going to die, to be cognizant of this obligation, and when Death comes leave willingly and gratefully, and in doing so, reject Death’s power. Memento mori compels us to use this awareness to power living each day with purpose, awe, and zeal as if it were our last.
For some of us, it will be.
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