How do the Stoics say to cope with the death of a loved one?

Grief is allowed, but it has a shape

Seneca writes to Lucilius about the death of a friend named Flaccus, and he does not tell him to feel nothing. He says plainly that he would not have Lucilius grieve more than is fitting, and that he hardly dares insist on no mourning at all, even though he thinks that would be the better way (Moral Letters 63.1). What he asks for instead is a limit. We may weep, but we must not wail. The eyes should not stay dry, nor should they overflow (Moral Letters 63.1).

This already corrects the popular image of Stoicism as emotional suppression. Even the most advanced person, Seneca says, someone who has risen above the reach of Fortune, will still be stung by a loss like this. The difference is that for him it is only a sting, not a wound that festers (Moral Letters 63.1). The goal is not to feel nothing. It is to feel in proportion, and to stop the feeling from curdling into something performed.

The self-seeking element in excessive mourning

Seneca goes further than most modern readers expect. He asks why people lament and weep to excess, and answers that it is because we look for proof of our bereavement in our tears. We do not simply give way to sorrow, he says, we parade it (Moral Letters 63.2). He adds a hard line: no man goes into mourning for his own sake, and there is an element of self-seeking even in our sorrow (Moral Letters 63.2). This is Seneca naming something uncomfortable: prolonged, dramatic grief can be partly about being seen to grieve, not only about the loss itself.

In a letter about a man named Marullus, who had lost his young son and was, in Seneca's account, rather womanish in his grief, Seneca is sharper still. He says the man deserved criticism rather than consolation, because he had let himself indulge in grief past the point of a natural first shock (Moral Letters 99.1-2). A son is dead, he tells Marullus bluntly, and a fragment of time has been lost (Moral Letters 99.2). The language here is harsh by modern standards, and Stoa does not soften that. Seneca's point is not that the death does not matter. It is that indulgence in grief, sustained past the initial wound, is itself a kind of folly that can be criticized like any other excess.

Epictetus: nothing was ever yours to keep

Epictetus approaches the same problem from a different angle, before the loss happens. His advice in the Handbook is to never say of anything "I have lost it," but "I have returned it." Your child is dead: it is returned. Your wife is dead: she is returned (Handbook 11). He extends this to an estate taken away, and reminds you that while something is given to you to possess, you should take care of it, but not view it as your own, the way a traveler treats a room at a hotel (Handbook 11).

This is not a claim that love or grief do not matter. It is a claim about what was ever genuinely yours. For Epictetus, a person's faculty of choice is the only thing truly up to them. People and possessions are on loan from something beyond your control, and their loss, however painful, is not a theft. He makes the same point in miniature with ordinary objects: if you love a cup, remember you love only ceramic cups in general, so that if it breaks you are not disturbed. If you kiss your child or your wife, know that you kiss something human, and so you will not be disturbed if either of them dies (Handbook 3).

What this changes

Taken together, these texts give you two tools rather than one rule. Seneca gives you permission to weep, with a caution against letting grief become theater or self-indulgence past its natural course. Epictetus gives you a standing posture toward everyone you love, held before any loss occurs: hold them as a traveler holds a room, fully present, carefully tended, never owned. The concrete practice is to notice, this week, one person or thing you are attached to, and ask honestly whether you have been treating it as yours to keep rather than something given to you for a time.