"Grief, Death and Longing in Stoic and Christian Ethics"

“Dying today all too often occurs in a way that people say they do not want, such as in a hospital after a long engagement with medical interventions with little chance of success. Although religious ethicists are recovering the insights of the late medieval and early modern tradition of ars moriendi in order to confront this medicalized dying, these same scholars question the value of the Stoic approach toward death that shaped that tradition. Stoic criticisms of grief, indifference toward death, and concern for autarchy and self-control seem to present three fundamental problems for one’s relations to the world and others. Failure to grieve the loss of a loved one seems to be inhuman or at least a radically deficient account of human affections.”