Seneca (b.4BCE-d.65CE) was a Roman philosopher, statesman, dramatist, and satirist.  He lived during the turbulent years of the Roman Empire serving as a senator and providing counsel to the emperors Claudius, Caligula, and Nero.  He was the tutor for the young Nero but lost favor with the Emperor and committed suicide rather than be executed as Nero had ordered.  His  letters and plays are an important source of material from early Stoicism.

Seneca regards philosophy as a balm for the wounds of life, and he considers it important to confront one’s own mortality and be able to face death. His writings were an important source for the thinking of Montaigne and other Renaissance thinkers, especially his views on dying and death contained mostly in the 124 letters that have been preserved.

Interestingly, he uses the same metaphor in discussing death that the Vernerable Bede and Nabokov use, the image of one person’s life being a brief interlude of existence and consciousness between two vast periods when one didn’t exist.  He writes, “…for death is non-existence. I know what that’s like. It will be the same after me as it was before me.  If death holds any torment, then that torment must also have existed before we came forth into the light, but back then we felt nothing troubling… If someone pities the dead, let him also pity those not yet born…It’s just the same: you won’t exist, just as you didn’t; neither past, nor future is yours.  There’s no life that is not short…. Death is the undoing of all our sorrows, an end beyond which our ills cannot go; it returns us to that peace in which we reposed before we were born.”

One of his main arguments is that death is always near, is unpredictable, is universal, and certain; hence, there is no reason to fear it.  He writes: “Life is granted with death as its limitation; it’s the universal endpoint, To fear it is madness, since fear is for things we’re unsure of; certainties are merely awaited. What does it matter how long you dodge the thing you cannot escape?”…The torment we feel is of our own making; we tremble when we believe death is near; but whom is it not near, when its ready and waiting at every moment, in every place?  Study death always so that you’ll fear it never.”

Like Montaigne’s advice to make a friend of death, Seneca advises us while still vital as follows: “Before I became old, I took care to live well; in old age I take care to die well.  We must prepare for death before life…It matters how well you live, not how long.”  This could have been written by Chodron.  Stoics, Buddhists, Jews, Christians all appear to agree that death should not be feared. Rather one should live life in such a manner that one prepares for a good death, one at peace, quietly surrounded by those who love us.  Good advice.