Death as repossession

Imagine being in debt that you can't pay. The repo company shows up at your door, ready to take everything you “own.” There goes the TV. The SUV is loaded onto a tow truck. Furniture is removed, along with many other prized possessions. It seems like I'll be left standing with only my underwear on after everything is said and done.

This sounds amusing, but also unsettling. I doubt anyone reading this has ever had a repo company take anything from them.

However, death will do that to us.

Death repossesses nearly everything from us. It seizes our possessions, our titles, our status, and eventually even our bodies. If that is true, what, if anything, survives death's reach?

You can't take it with you

Seneca describes what death takes from us.

You may take away no more than you brought in; what is more, you must throw away the major portion of that which you brought with you into life: you will be stripped of the very skin which covers you—that which has been your last protection; you will be stripped of the flesh, and lose the blood which is suffused and circulated through your body; you will be stripped of bones and sinews, the framework of these transitory and feeble parts. — Seneca, Letters 102.25

This sounds bleak. But his words prepare us for an unexpected conclusion. After describing everything death strips away, Seneca turns to what it cannot take.

"For the real good does not perish; it is certain and lasting, and it consists of wisdom and virtue; it is the only immortal thing that falls to the lot of mortals." Letters 98.9

The Stoics never promised that our possessions, our achievements, or even our names would endure. Those belong to the realm of externals. But they insisted that a life shaped by wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance was never wasted simply because it ended. Death can take our body, but it cannot erase the fact that we chose to live well while we were here.

The Stoic focus on the good life

That's the only thing that remains beyond death's reach: how we chose to live our lives.

People sometimes think the Stoics were obsessed with death. Quite the contrary, they were focused on living well. Death serves as a magnifying glass, revealing how people are actually living. It reveals what truly matters and where our priorities lie.

Many spend an inordinate amount of time on externals. The degrees, the cars, the boats, the number of followers on social media. It's almost as if death replies, "That's fine. I'll repossess the degrees. The cars. The boats. The followers too. They were never yours to keep anyway.” Yet we devote so much of our lives to these things. We didn’t bring these in; we can’t depart with them.

Virtue cannot be repossessed

I'm a hospice volunteer and visit a woman who is confined to bed nearly all the time. Her dresser is lined with family photographs and a handful of books that she clearly treasures.

Sitting with her recently, I found myself wondering what would remain after she was gone. Everything around her would one day be passed on to someone else.

But something else would not. She had spent more than thirty years caring for children through her daycare. She was a devoted daughter, mother, and friend. Her love and devotion—not her possessions—shaped the person she became. According to Seneca, her virtue is the only true good that death cannot repossess.

Then Seneca offers this one last challenge to us:

He whose daily life has been a rounded whole is easy in his mind; but those who live for hope alone find that the immediate future always slips from their grasp, and that greed steals along in its place, and the fear of death occurs, which lays a curse upon everything else. — Seneca, Moral Letters 101.10

Death's repossession notice never tells us the day it will arrive. That’s why Seneca urges us to make each day "a rounded whole." If death eventually reclaims everything external, then each day offers another opportunity to cultivate the wisdom and virtue that death can never repossess.

Glenn Citerony is an Executive Wellness Coach who employs Stoic concepts to help improve people’s lives. He is passionate about Stoicism and its relevance to addressing today’s challenges. Glenn can be reached at glennciterony.com.

---