On death

Marcus returned to the subject of death constantly, not out of morbidity but as a tool for clarity. He had buried most of his children. He governed during a plague that killed a significant portion of the empire. Death was not abstract to him, and he refused to let it be abstract in his thinking.

The Stoic practice of memento mori, remembering that you will die, was never meant to produce dread. It was meant to produce proportion. Most of what consumes a day, the slights, the delays, the things that did not go as planned, shrinks immediately when held against the fact of mortality. Marcus used the thought not to withdraw from life but to engage with it more honestly: to stop postponing the person he meant to be, since the postponement assumes a tomorrow no one is promised.