The Anatomy of Melancholy

Why, then, since you are so well disposed, should you not say with old Simeon, “Lord, now let your servant depart in peace”; or with Paul, “I desire to depart and be with Christ”? “Blessed is the death that opens the way to a blessed life”: it is a blessed hour that leads us to a blessed life, and blessed are those who die in the Lord.

But life is sweet, and death is less terrible in itself than the things that accompany it: a loathsome disease, pain, horror and the rest, and often the manner of it—hanging, being broken on the wheel, being burned alive. Servetus the heretic, who suffered at Geneva, was brought to the stake and saw the executioner approaching with fire in his hand: “At the sight of the fire, the man cried out so terribly that he terrified the whole crowd.” He roared so loudly that he frightened the people. An ancient Stoic would have scorned this. Some are troubled by the thought of being left unburied, or something of the kind:

Your loving mother will not lay you in the earth Or place your limbs in your ancestral tomb. You will be left to wild birds, and, drowned in the depths, The waves will carry you; hungry fish will lick your wounds.

Your loving parents will not bury you To lie entombed among your ancestors. Wild birds will devour your carcass, Or hungry fishes’ maws will strip your drowned corpse.

As Socrates told Crito, I am not concerned with what is done to me when I am dead. “The loss of a grave is easily borne.” I do not care, so long as I cannot feel it. Let them set my head on the peak of Tenerife and my quartered limbs in the four corners of the world; “let me feed the crows upon a cross”; let wolves or bears devour me.

The sky covers the man who has no burial urn.

The canopy of heaven covers the man who has no tomb. So too with our friends: why should their departure trouble us so much? They are better off, as we hope. Why, then, do you lament like those Paul reproached in his time, who “have no hope”—1 Thessalonians 4:13? It is fitting that there should be some solemn observance.

But we should bury the dead, with steadfast hearts, Standing firm and allowing a single day for weeping.

Job’s friends said nothing to him for the first seven days. They let sorrow and distress take their course, sitting sad and silent beside him. When Jupiter himself wept for Sarpedon, what else was the poet suggesting but that some sorrow is good?

Who but someone out of his mind forbids a mother To weep at her child’s funeral?

Who can blame a loving mother for weeping over her children? Besides, as Plutarch maintains, we cannot help lamenting. “Freedom from grief is not given to everyone.” To feel no sorrow is to lose mercy and pity. Weeping for our friends is a natural emotion; lamenting and grieving are irresistible impulses. “I do not know how,” says Seneca, “but sometimes it is good to be miserable in misery; and, for the most part, all grief discharges itself in tears.”