Seneca Moral essays
Seneca: You will show more respect for the youth…
You will show more respect for the youth himself, who well deserves that it should make you glad to speak and think of him, if you make him able to meet his mother with a cheerful countenance, even as he was wont to do when alive.
The passage follows a public-domain translation of Seneca’s moral essays. The reading beside it is ours.
The best way to honor someone who has died is not always to keep the room permanently dark. If they loved you, they would not want their memory to make you unable to meet the world. Seneca urges the mourner to remember the person in a way that restores warmth rather than only reopening the wound. That is a demanding shift: from asking, "How can I prove I still hurt?" to asking, "How can I carry what was best in them forward?" Speak their name. Tell the stories that make people smile. Let their generosity, courage, or humor influence how you treat someone today. Sorrow has a place, but it should not be the only evidence of love. A cheerful face is not forgetfulness. It can be the sign that the relationship has become part of you.
Related passages
- Seneca It is to guarantee the safety of all these that Fortune has struck you in this quarter: you have many left in whom you…
- Seneca Nature gave him to you, as she gives others to other brothers, not as an absolute property, but as a loan: afterwards…
- Seneca You are mistaken! your brother has not lost the light of day, but has obtained a more enduring light: whither he has…