What does Marcus Aurelius say about facing death naturally?

Marcus does not argue that death is pleasant or that you should feel nothing about it. He argues something more specific: death belongs to the same category as growing teeth, going grey, or a wife carrying a child to term. It is one of the operations of nature that mark out a life, and treating it as a special horror is a mistake in judgment, not a fact about death itself (Meditations 9.3).

The common misreading of Stoic advice on death is that you are supposed to suppress fear, grit your teeth, and pretend not to mind. Marcus rules this out directly. He says the reflecting person is neither careless nor impatient nor contemptuous about death, but waits for it as one of the operations of nature (Meditations 9.3). That is three failure modes, not one. Carelessness treats death as nothing worth attention. Impatience wishes it along, a kind of morbid rush toward the exit. Contempt sneers at it, which is its own form of drama. The alternative he actually recommends is quieter than any of these: readiness. He compares it to the ordinary readiness of a pregnant woman for the moment labor begins. You do not know the hour, but you are not alarmed by the fact that it is coming.

The reasoning behind this rests on a claim Marcus makes elsewhere and depends on here: death is not good or bad, because it falls equally on good people and bad people alike, and whatever does not make a person worse cannot make that person's life worse (Meditations 2.11). If death is not evil, then the correct response to it is not the response owed to an evil. The fear looks reasonable only if you have already, without noticing, made a judgment that death is a bad thing happening to you. Take that judgment away and what remains is a natural transition, like the ones your body has already gone through many times: infancy into childhood, childhood into having a beard.

This does not mean Marcus was indifferent to living. He is careful to add a "vulgar kind of comfort," his own phrase, aimed at anyone who needs more than the abstract argument (Meditations 9.3). Part of that comfort is unflattering: he tells himself to look honestly at the people and behavior he will be leaving, and admits that the one thing that could reasonably attach a person to life is the chance to keep living alongside others who share your principles. He does not pretend that leaving is nothing. He pretends nothing about the good in living, either. He simply refuses to add fear on top of the natural fact.

What changes if you take this seriously is not that death becomes attractive. It is that you stop treating your fear of death as self-evidently justified. You start asking what judgment is producing the fear, and whether that judgment survives examination. Marcus's own move, elsewhere in the same book, is to notice that thinking about death sharpens how you act now rather than making you reckless (Meditations 2.11), which is a case for taking mortality seriously rather than avoiding the thought of it.

A concrete way to practice this: when the thought of death intrudes, do not push it away and do not dramatize it. Ask, the way Marcus does, what exactly this thing is doing to you, right now, and whether it is doing anything at all besides being feared. Most days, the honest answer is that it is doing nothing except waiting, the way it waited on every day before this one.