How do the Stoics say to cope with the death of a loved one?

Seneca does not tell his reader to feel nothing. Writing to console Lucilius over the death of a friend named Flaccus, he says plainly that he would not have his friend sorrow more than is fitting, but he will not insist that he not mourn at all, even though he thinks that would be the better way (Moral Letters 63.1). The instruction that follows is exact: let not the eyes be dry when we have lost a friend, nor let them overflow. We may weep, but we must not wail (Moral Letters 63.1).

That line is the hinge of the whole Stoic position. Grief itself is not condemned. What Seneca targets is excess: wailing, prolonged lamentation, grief performed rather than felt. He is blunt about why people overdo it. It is because we seek the proofs of our bereavement in our tears, and do not give way to sorrow, but merely parade it (Moral Letters 63.2). He even says there is an element of self-seeking in our sorrow, since no man goes into mourning purely for the dead man's sake (Moral Letters 63.2). The tears in front of others, kept up past their natural course, are partly for an audience.

This gets harder in a second letter, written to a man named Marullus after the death of his young son. Seneca does not console him gently. He says Marullus deserved criticism rather than consolation, because he had let himself sink into an indulgence of grief (Moral Letters 99.1). Seneca's imagined rebuke is severe: is it solace that you look for? Let me give you a scolding instead, he writes, adding that a fragment of time has been lost, not a whole future (Moral Letters 99.2). He does allow a window for the first shock to be worked off before anyone is rebuked, since a person newly stricken must be humoured for a while and allowed to satisfy his grief or at least survive its first violence (Moral Letters 99.1). So the sequence matters: grieve first, recover your judgment after.

Epictetus gives the doctrine its sharpest form, and this is where people most often misread the Stoics as cold. In the Handbook he tells the reader never to say of anything I have lost it, but instead I have returned it (Handbook 11). Your child is dead: she is returned. Your wife is dead: she is returned. His question is pointed: what difference does it make to you who the giver assigns to take it back? While it is given to you, take care of it, but do not view it as your own, just as travelers regard a hotel room (Handbook 11). Earlier in the same work he gives the practice that makes this possible before loss ever happens: when you kiss your child or your wife, remind yourself that you only kiss things that are human, and thus you will not be disturbed if either of them dies (Handbook 3).

The common misreading is that this is a trick for feeling less pain, a kind of pre-emptive numbing. That is not what either author is doing. Epictetus is not saying a wife or child is a mere object on loan like a hotel room in value. He is saying that what is up to you is your judgment about the loss, not the loss itself, and that judgment is what determines whether grief becomes a settled false belief that something irreplaceable and rightfully yours has been stolen, rather than the natural sting Seneca grants even to the wise. Seneca's own point about Flaccus makes the same distinction from the other direction: even a person of ideal steadfastness would be stung by such a loss, but it would only be a sting, not a wound that governs him (Moral Letters 63.1).

Read together, the two letters and the two Handbook passages give a single shape. Grieve, because you are human and the sting is real and not up to you. But do not let grief become performance, and do not let your judgment about what has happened outlast the honest first shock of it. The one concrete practice both authors offer is to say the thing plainly to yourself in the moment of loss: she is returned, not she is lost, and then let the weeping run its natural course without stretching it into wailing.