An ode to goodness

My grandmother passed away recently.

Thursday morning, waiting for the usual good morning text from my family, I received this news instead. I was trying to gauge my feelings, or rather, the lack of them. A little background here. She was the last of my grandparents, the others having been long gone. She was the only grandparent I’d known, who had cared for me and watched over me, the few times I had stayed at her place during holidays, until I was almost in my teens.

And then, some bad stuff happened, and my family had to cut ties with my mother’s relatives, my grandmother not excluded. For their part, they unapologetically made no efforts to patch up, knowing full well that it was they that were in the wrong. It has been thirteen years since, half a lifetime, without a word of contact between us.

And now she was gone. Here I was, on a smoke break at work, trying to digest this news. Added to the fact that I am, for the most part, an emotionless person, time had dulled any grief I should have been feeling. However, I knew that the same could not be said of my mom. She is a kind person, one who sheds tears if she were to stumble upon an unfortunate event on the news that resulted in the loss of life. And this was her own mother that she had lost.

Wanting to check in on her, I called her up. She seemed to be holding up pretty well. She told me that her and Dad had gone to the funeral, where they met her brother, and other relatives, people they had neither seen nor spoken to in ages. Everyone was civil to another. How else should one behave at a funeral?

Her brother, my uncle, has always been one that has shirked a lifestyle that involves a regular job and a steady source of income, for reasons I know not, and choose not to care about. Some say he’s just always been lazy, some say he preferred his alternate lifestyle. But now, time had worn him down as well, and I was told he’s old and decrepit. He’d been the only offspring that had stayed with my grandmother till the end, the other daughter too having cut ties. (Yes, I know, we’re a messed-up family)

My mother, narrating all this to me, burst into tears. I comforted her as best as one could on a phone call. She composed herself surprisingly well. She told me that Dad and her stayed till the end, and handed my uncle a sum of money, to help with the funerary expenses, and then some for himself. He accepted it with thanks.

This gave me pause. I like to think I’m a nice person. Or rather, I strive to be nice. I am nice to people who I have nothing to gain from. I smile and greet passersby, I hold doors open, I tip waiters and bartenders generously. Some of you reading this might find it absurd that I would put these down as examples of being nice, but you’d be surprised. What some of us think is basic courtesy and decency might not come as naturally to others. This could be a by-product of my environment, but it is also a choice. A choice I try to make every time I get the chance.

But here’s the thing. More often than not, me being nice to someone is a conscious decision. Something I tell myself to do, day in, day out. And now, having known what my parents did for my uncle, I was slightly overwhelmed. What does it take, to help, without restraint, someone who has terribly wronged you, who never once apologized for it, and full well knowing that they could never repay you in any way?

I guess that’s the difference between being nice, and being good. My parents, unlike me, don’t have to make a choice. Here I am, trying my hardest to be a good person, while they come by it naturally.