Grief in Pieces

This entry is part 35 of 45 in the series Journey Through Stoicism

Grief often comes in pieces. It is not only the heavy silence of a funeral or the tears of a first night alone. It shows up later, uninvited, when you reach for the phone to call your mother and remember she is gone. It arrives when you read something that your best friend would have laughed about, and for a second, you think, “Rick will love this,” before the memory catches up with you. Grief lingers in fragments like these, scattered across years.

Grief is no stranger to me. It was a “profession” for a time as I grew up in and then worked for several years in the funeral industry. More recently, my Pastor introduced me to the ancient phrase “memento mori,” meaning “remember that you must die.” It was a comment about death that opened a door for me, not into despair, but into reflection. The Stoics built much of their philosophy around this reminder, not to diminish life but to make it more precious. Grief forces us to confront mortality, but it can also remind us how deeply we have loved.

The shape of grief

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross gave us the well-known “five stages of grief:” denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. She did not mean them to be a strict sequence. People experience them in different orders, sometimes more than once, and often overlapping. Still, the stages provide us with language for something otherwise difficult to name.

The Stoics, too, understood the concept of grief. They wrote consolations for friends who lost children. They endured plagues, wars, and the death of loved ones. They did not command us to simply “shoulder through it.” Instead, they urged us to recognize grief as natural, even as a sign of the depth of our care, while warning against being trapped by it.

Denial

Denial is the initial shock that occurs when reality has not yet fully settled in. For me, it is the phantom thought to call Mom, the muscle memory of years. Then comes the realization: she will not answer.

Seneca, writing to a grieving friend, urged him not to hide from the truth. To pretend death has not come is to prolong the wound. For the Stoics, clarity is mercy. Life is fragile. We must face that fact, not to harden our hearts, but to keep them open without illusion.

Other traditions echo this. In Buddhism, impermanence is a central concept: everything changes and passes away. To resist this truth is to suffer more. To accept it is to begin to heal.

Anger

Anger often follows. Why now? Why him? Why her?

During the early years of the AIDS epidemic, when I was working in the funeral business, I saw anger everywhere. Young men were dying while the world looked away. Families were left broken, sometimes even ashamed, when they needed comfort the most. I buried friends, cared for a friend through long hospital stays, and tried to offer dignity in the midst of what was sometimes cruelty. There were days when grief and rage were inseparable.

Epictetus would not have been surprised. He taught that anger usually rises when we fight against what is outside our control. We shake our fists at nature, disease, or death itself, as though our fury could change the facts. The Stoic practice here is to pause and ask, ‘What is mine to do? ‘I could not stop the epidemic. But I could offer care, stand by my friends, and honor their memory.

Anger is not evil. It shows that something matters to us. But left unchecked, it consumes the very strength we need to endure.

Bargaining

Then comes bargaining. If only we had one more day. If only the diagnosis had come sooner. If only I had said what I meant to say.

When Rick died a couple of years ago, I found myself thinking these thoughts. He had been my closest friend since junior high, and his absence left a hollow place that still surprises me. I found myself wishing for just one more dinner, one more conversation filled with the snark and laughter we shared.

The Stoics advised a different kind of preparation. They practiced premeditatio malorum. This is the idea of imagining losses before they come. The point was not to be morbid, but to be ready. If we rehearse the truth that our loved ones are mortal, then we can love them more fiercely while they are here.

This is not far from the Christian wisdom of numbering our days, or the Buddhist reminder that clinging only deepens suffering. Bargaining reveals our longing, but it also teaches us to treasure what cannot be bargained for: the present moment.

Depression

Depression is the stage most of us fear. It’s the heavy fog when nothing feels alive. I have known it as the quiet ache that surfaces when a memory of Rick resurfaces years later, or when silence fills the void where my mother’s voice once was.

Marcus Aurelius acknowledged sorrow but warned against letting it harden into despair. To collapse entirely into grief is to abandon the life we still hold. Modern Stoics, such as Massimo Pigliucci, have shared the same lesson. When his father died suddenly, he turned to Marcus’s Meditations. He found in those words a reminder that death is not a punishment but part of nature. That did not erase his pain, but it helped him keep living through it.

The Stoics invite us to sit with sorrow without letting it master us. Depression reminds us how profound the loss is. But life asks us not to stop there.

Acceptance

Acceptance is not forgetting. It is carrying grief differently.

For me, acceptance comes when I walk the memory of my mother’s last months back to a labyrinth at the hospital in Shelby, North Carolina. At the end of the path is a bronze plaque inscribed with lines from Psalm 139: If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.

Those words remind us that grief can be held by something larger than us. The Stoics would say we must align ourselves with nature. The psalmist says we are guided and not alone. Both point to the same truth: acceptance is not the end of love, but the beginning of a new way of living with it.

Grief carried forward

Grief never vanishes. It changes form. It becomes a sudden laugh when you remember an old joke. It becomes an ache when you see something your loved one would have cherished. It becomes the quiet gratitude that you had them at all. For me, it comes in “pieces.” Those many small things that remind us of people, places, and things we no longer have. A sudden memory from long ago that just pops into your consciousness. A reflex to reach for the phone to call someone who’s no longer there. This is how grief comes to me, and how it reminds me of things that are no more. But depending on how we frame it, it can be just as much about joy as sadness, and how far removed we are from the loss. There’s the sadness of realizing something is lost or missing, but the joy of the memory it can return to us of good times or important people in our lives.

The Stoics teach us not to rage against grief, but to carry it with dignity. Christianity assures us that even in death, we are not abandoned. Buddhism reminds us that impermanence makes life all the more precious. Together, these voices suggest that grief is not just pain, but a teacher.

I began this reflection with the phrase memento mori. To remember death is not to be morbid, but to live with urgency. Grief sharpens that lesson. It tells us that time is fragile, that each person we love is a gift, and that every day is one more chance to live faithfully and well.