Kindness Remembered

11 readers share stories of caring and connection

A tallis
An email
A strand of pearls
A kugel
A thoughtful gesture
A small act
Yet the kindness took root
And the memory lingers
Not in Our Family
C.R. Far Rockaway, NY
Scandal happens to other people. Not to us. Not in our family.
For decades, this was the unspoken mantra in my head. What we experienced, what went on behind closed doors… that wasn’t scandalous, that was just daily life. No one outside the family would ever know. It was just our normal.
Until it wasn’t. Cracks slowly emerged in the shiny facade that had been carefully erected, projecting cool, enviable confidence to the outside world, even as the inside was gradually crumbling. But the more the inside crumbled, the louder the mantra reverberated in my head: Scandal happens to other people. Not to us.
So as we faced the inevitable shattering of the facade, we dialed up the mantra, gave it a little tweak. If the shiny facade we projected to the world is going to come apart, at the very least, we’d retain our dignity and privacy. No one from the outside world would hear a word about the goings-on from us. Let the rumor mill churn on its own, such is the way of the world; no piece of juicy hearsay would ever be traced back to a reliable source inside the family. We have each other, and we have busy, productive lives, baruch Hashem. This sideshow does not have to show up anywhere outside the four walls of our nuclear family.
And we kept to it, for months. Even as the crumbling interior generated the equivalent of multiple four-alarm fires on a daily basis, with raging emotions and practical emergencies that needed to be resolved at a dizzying pace, we had this. We’d been doing it all our life. What happens inside and what’s visible outside are parallel realities that never meet.
But then, there was a breach. From the most unexpected of sources, a public bombshell was dropped and the narrative slipped out of our control, leaking through the cracks that had been forming. For the first time in my life, when I left my house in the morning and saw women chatting at the bus stop and men walking home from Shacharis deep in conversation, the thought occurred to me: They are probably talking about me!
Still, I stuck with my trusty mantra. Yes, today’s juicy story may be about me and my family, but scandal doesn’t happen to us! So I kept going. If my workmates or neighbors had been schmoozing about me and were looking closer at me for any clues, they wouldn’t see a thing. Business as usual.
I hadn’t gotten to this point without practice, and maybe all that practice was for this moment, as I ran meetings and did carpool and waved to my neighbors and went about my business as if a grenade hadn’t just exploded near me, scattering explosive particles across the world on three continents.
I didn’t stop for a moment to think of the situation from my friends’ perspectives. I was so focused on doing my thing that it didn’t occur to me that they were grappling with this revelation. I had zero expectations from them.
A couple of days later, at nearly the same exact moment, my email pinged, and the doorbell rang. They were from two different friends, from totally different social circles — they don’t even know each other — so the timing was uncanny, as was the commonality of the unspoken message between the lines of their brief notes: We can’t imagine what this week has been like for you, we’re thinking of you. No need to respond, no need to share any details, but we’re here for you, on your terms, whenever you want.
At that moment, alone in my house, those tactful and meaningful gestures of kindness hit the bull’s-eye. It all caught up with me and I broke down with the deep, racking sobs that had been sitting just beneath the surface of my still-chanting mantra.
Scandal can happen to anyone — yes, even to me. But my friends gave me the greatest gifts I can ask for: dignity, respect for my privacy, and the message that whatever happens, I am still the same person to them.
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