Seneca on Grief and the Key to Resilience in the Face of Loss: An Extraordinary Letter to His Mother [BrainPickings.org]

“Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be,” Joan Didion observed in her classic meditation on loss. Abraham Lincoln, in his moving letter of consolation to a grief-stricken young woman, wrote of how time transmutes grief into “a sad sweet feeling in your heart.” But what, exactly, is the mechanism of that transmutation and how do we master it before it masters us when grief descends in one of its unforeseeable guises?

[For more of this story, written by Maria Popova, go to https://www.brainpickings.org/...nsolation-to-helvia/]