Falling Short on Discipline
Some of us abide by a code or a discipline that keeps us mindful of our behavior and thoughts. We strive to achieve and maintain a perfect streak of mindful practice in everything we do.
But the perfect Stoic does not exist any more than the perfect son or daughter, mother or father, plan or strategy. We think that just because we are mandated to abide by the newly enforced laws pertaining to our health and wellbeing that this pandemic will not affect us all on a personal level. One wouldn’t think that someone close to us will catch the virus because we all have a bias to our own perspectives, that if I can be mindful to keep a six-foot distance between myself and others, that my friends and folks back home will remember to do the same.
Yet when loss hits the heart, we are still caught by surprise. No one ever sees it coming to their own family, and when it does, we think, “how could this have happened?”.
When my paternal grandmother passed away in 2018, I looked out my kitchen window and spoke to the little robin that had just landed on a branch as if it were her. I told her that I was okay and wished her the most peaceful travel to God’s arms. Then, the robin flew away.
When my maternal grandmother passed away in 2019, I had booked an emergency flight to Florida to be with my mom, who requested my presence. I spent the week with my family helping with the funeral arrangements and wondering why some of my relatives were acting inconsolable when my grandmother had lived well and long enough to see her great-grandchildren come into the world. They mourned her death in black while I was celebrating her life in color.
On April 20th, I lost my uncle to COVID-19. And I was not prepared.
As a Stoic practitioner, this goes against the principle of Premeditatio Malorum (“expecting the worst”). I learned that he fought pneumonia twice in his life prior to catching this virus. This alone should have prepared me for his sudden passing. But it didn’t.
So what happened?
Backstory
When I last visited my paternal grandmother in 2015, she would tell me how she “felt ready to go home to God”. It was sad to hear her say that, but I took it as my cue to start preparing for the inevitable. I would remind myself every night for the next three years that she could leave life at any moment. When her time came, I felt calm. I called up my father to check on him, and he was certainly sad. Yet he also sounded calm, either because his daughter’s voice at the other end was calm or he too had prepared for this moment.
I wish I could provide the same solid example for my maternal grandmother. Unfortunately, I did not keep in touch with her. When I last saw her, it was the weekend just before her death. My mother video-called me to show me how my grandmother was recovering from surgery at the hospital. She couldn’t speak. I told her I loved her. The next day, I was getting ready for work when my mother called and asked me to fly down to Florida, that my grandmother took a sudden turn for the worst and that she wasn’t going to make it. I called in my emergency at work and booked the next flight out. I used those three hours to explain to my brother that we cannot expect her to make a miraculous recovery. She was 86, had pre-existing conditions, and was fresh out of surgery. Her odds were not great, but regardless she lived a full life.
“You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Perhaps it was easier to accept my grandmothers’ passing due to their age. They both lived full and happy lives, surrounded by family who loved them dearly. My uncle was 61. His two sons are freshmen young adults who have barely begun to scratch the surface of pursuing their passions. But his odds were not great either. So why does losing him hurt so damn much?
The Answer
Simply put, I was attached. To him and my cousins. To the hope that he was practicing social distancing but was just unlucky to have caught it due to his essential job, and to the hope that he would make a miraculous recovery. I can gush about how he was the first uncle I knew and loved, how I’ve known his two sons since they were in the womb, how even to the very last day I saw him in July 2019 he still gave me money “for ice cream” like he did when I was a child. But I still had hope that he would recover despite his medical history. And that hope was quickly rendered powerless due to my own biases.
Another reason why I fell short on my stoic practice can be that his two sons are like brothers to me. The fact that they lost their father to the coronavirus makes me feel like I lost mine too. That is, by far, my most forceful wake-up call to start expecting the worst …
The Perfect Stoic
The perfect Stoic would have accepted my uncle’s fate as soon as word of him being in the hospital came. The perfect Stoic would have managed their emotions impeccably when the news of his death came two days later. But there is no such thing as the perfect Stoic. Even Seneca expressed his feelings of sadness when he discussed a friend’s death in his letters to Lucilius. He also discussed how he managed his sadness by remembering that Death comes for us all eventually. Marcus Aurelius also felt some level of grief for his soldiers in times of war. These men were brothers, husbands, fathers, sons. He was sending them to their deaths, but he remembered that it was their duty to die for king and country. Memento mori (“remember you will die”) was something they both practiced. They didn’t get it right ALL the time. Practice and mastery are two sides of a coin that we in today’s society seldom get to flip.
“Is it possible to be free from error? Not by any means, but it is possible to be a person stretching to avoid error.”
— Epictetus, Enchiridion
At the end of the day, we are still human. We will hurt when our loved ones die. The Stoics did, but they always picked themselves back up as soon as they were down. It’s okay to fall short of strictness in our practices and trainings sometimes. As long as we remember that this pain will only exist when we allow it and that it never lasts forever, we can still pick up where we left off.
Stoics are not machines in that they are cold and unfeeling, nor are they innately programmed. They are disciplined. And discipline takes time to master.
