The Anatomy of Melancholy

Correct yourself likewise, then, and take comfort in this: we must die, all of us must die, and we shall rise again, as Cicero believed. “Our reunion will be far more joyful than our parting was painful and bitter.” Our second meeting will be much more pleasant than our departure was grievous.

“Yes, but he was my dearest and most loving friend, my only friend.”

What shame or limit can there be in grieving For someone so dear?

And who can blame my sorrow?

You may well be ashamed to admit it, I say with Seneca: to have only one anchor in such a storm as this! Go and find another. As for him, you do him a great wrong by wishing that he had lived longer.

Would you have him remain frail and sickly, like a tired traveller who reaches his inn exhausted only to begin his journey again? Or would you have him freed from his miseries? You have more reason to rejoice that he is gone.

Another laments a most delightful wife, a young wife—“Proserpina had not yet taken away the golden lock”—a wife such as no mortal man ever had, so good a wife; but she is now dead and gone, “and lies buried in the tomb of oblivion.”

I answer him in Seneca’s words, if such a woman was ever to be found: he either found her so or made her so. If he found her, he may be just as fortunate in finding another. If he made her so, as Critobulus in Xenophon did with his wife, he can just as easily teach another; “and one as good follows as the first was good.” He need not despair while the same teacher is still available.

But was she good? Had some swaggering soldier perhaps put her to the test, like the Ephesian widow in Petronius, she might not have stood firm. Many a man would gladly have been rid of his wife. Before, you were bound; now you are free. It is foolish to love your fetters even if they are gold.

Go somewhere else, and you will find an aged father sighing for a son, a lovely child:

A tender child’s breast, such as would soften even The pitiless hearts of Thracians.

He who now lies asleep Would make a pitiless Thracian weep.

Or a beautiful daughter who died young, “before experiencing the first pleasures of a new marriage bed.” Or a forlorn son grieving for his dead father. But why? “He went out first; he came in first”: he came first, and must go first. “Alas, your devotion is in vain,” and so on. Would you have the laws of nature changed, and have him live for ever? Julius Caesar, Augustus, Alcibiades, Galen and Aristotle lost their fathers when young. And, on the other hand, why should you take the death of your little son so heavily?

Is it because he was dying neither by fate nor by a deserved death, But wretchedly before his day?