Sickness unto death? Or fear of death as a sickness?

Seneca argues that we still treat death as that which happens to someone else. Like Tolstoy almost two millennia later, who knew that war can happen only because of our capacity to believe someone else will get killed in the battle, Seneca says that “we never think of death except as it affects our neighbor” (Ep. 101.6). Seneca ’s psychological point here is that human beings know they will die, but nevertheless deny their deathward existence by projecting it onto their fellows. In short, Seneca’s letters repeatedly display his concern to grasp the widespread human condition vis-a-vis death as a self-destructive denial of the way things are and must be: we know that we are mortal and must die, and yet out of a fear of our death we organize our lives to a stunning degree in an attempt to avoid it. For Seneca, this is a sickness from which we need to be healed.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 15