I think we all must confront grief in our way, maybe if we are lucky with close family members or friends with whom we can seek solace and share our emotions. I don't subscribe to the Stoic preventive lifestyle because I don't want to be told how to feel or not feel. I am what I am.

Well define "excessive". I think grief naturally resolves, even with major losses, typically within a couple of years -- at least enough for a person to "let go / move on". "Excessive" to me has always been canonically represented to me by a woman who was going on day after day, wailing about the loss of her husband on a grief forum, and I was surprised that so few people were being supportive ... until I realized she had been doing that on the forum for years. She was stuck in one of the initial stages of grief, the one that comes right after the numbing shock, where you are inconsolable. That portion of the grief process is generally over within 2 to 6 months -- while grief can still be profound beyond that point, you at least begin to have some level of emotional equilibrium coming back.

Unresolved grief like that, strikes me as the product of over-dependence on the deceased and on various forms of rigid thinking.

I will say that the death of my son two years ago this month was purer, more intense, but less complicated and more cleanly resolved, than was the grief of earlier losses (wife, brother, mother) to "other than natural causes" because it's the first such experience I had entirely outside the influence or even residual influence of theism. All the useless, angsty questions that theists ask themselves and each other trying to understand "god's will" or reconciling god's goodness with tragedy and suffering, were absent, and I'm certain I got back on my feet proportionally sooner for not having to deal with all that useless nonsense.

I was, as the article suggests, mentally prepared for never seeing my son again before he died. I left nothing undone or unsaid between us. I have no regrets. And I did not feel cheated or punished when he died. It still hurt, big time ... but it was not personal and beyond the pale. This is probably the idea about grieving that stoicism is trying to get across.

All that said, my son's death forever changed me and diminished me and it's just another 800 pound gorilla in my mental closet. It may be accepted and integrated, but it's not inconsequential, either.

I wonder how they define excessive.