On Monday, June 19, 2017, a fifteen-year-old girl from rural Pennsylvania hung herself.

Her family made the unusual decision to include the cause of her death in the teen’s obituary. Suicide is always surrounded by guilt, shame, and an extra burden of pain beyond what accompanies any other death. Thus it is seldom acknowledged in this sort of public way. But, the obituary explained, the family wanted to dispel rumors about the girl’s death with facts. In addition to the cause of death, the obituary adds this background:

If you take a minute and look at Sadie’s family dynamics you will see that a large percent of the people in her life were not related to her by blood but she was sent to us by God who knew this child needed a family. Sadie had a tough life and until a recent incident at school she handled everything life served her. For a young lady so excited about going to the High School things sure went terribly wrong for her. For the bullies involved, please know you were effective in making her feel worthless.

The obituary ends with the family suggesting, in lieu of flowers, “that you be kind to one another.”1

KINDNESS ISN’T NATURAL OR NICE

Kindness is unlike other virtues in that “we know exactly what it is, in most everyday situations; and yet our knowing what it is makes it easier to avoid.”2 We “are profoundly ambivalent about kindness” in that we “are never as kind as we want to be, but nothing outrages us more than people being unkind to us.”3

Kindness isn’t natural to most of us, which is why it is a virtue that needs to be taught and cultivated. When I was a child, my parents and a couple of my teachers “encouraged” (read: “pressured”) me to give time and attention to the children in my class and neighborhood who were often overlooked or left out. I wasn’t always happy then about being made to do this, but I am thankful now. Teaching me compassion and attentiveness toward others was one of the greatest gifts the adults in my life gave me as a child. The ones who give such kindness, particularly to “the least of these,” will be even more blessed than the ones who receive it.

Kindness isn’t sexy. It doesn’t dazzle you with wit and charm and verve. We want to be with the kind, even if we don’t want to be the kind. People envy the rich, the beautiful, the powerful, the courageous, and the wise. Do we ever envy the kind?

Envy, in fact, is the vice that, in the classical tradition, opposes kindness. Perhaps this seems strange until we look at what kindness truly is.

Kindness isn’t mere niceness. Although kind and nice are nearly synonymous now, the history of both words shows a once-sharp difference that is still helpful to consider today. Nice comes from a Latin word that means “unknowing” or “ignorant” and in Middle English came to mean “senseless” or “foolish.”4 The linguist Henry Watson Fowler opines, in his characteristically colorful way, that the current meaning of nice as similar to kind came about when nice became “too great a favourite with the ladies who have charmed out of it all its individuality and converted it into a mere diffuser of vague and mild agreeableness.”5

In its etymology, kind means something radically different from mere agreeableness. Indeed, kind, rightly understood, can include all sorts of disagreeableness. Kind comes from the same root from which we get the word kin. To be kind, then, is to treat someone like they are family. To possess the virtue of kindness is to be in the habit of treating all people as if they were family.

Kindness is like love. The love we have for family members takes different forms. It is not all Christmas mornings and movie nights. But it is always seeking and celebrating the good of that person. The same is true of kindness. As Augustine says of the virtuous life in City of God, a life characterized by kindness “is social, and for its own sake values the good of friends as its own, just as it wishes for them, for their own sake, what it wishes for itself.” Augustine then explains that by “friends” he means members of the family, household, community, and world—even the angels.6 All are kin.

ENVY: THE OPPOSITE OF KINDNESS

The connection between kindness and kinship helps make sense of the reason for envy being the vice that opposes kindness. Aquinas calls envy “sorrow for another’s good.”7 Unless the relationship is marred by some dysfunction, it is natural for us to celebrate a family member’s happiness or success. When something good happens to someone in our family, it is like it has happened to us. We share in that good rather than envy it. To seek and celebrate the good for others is then to treat them as family in this way. This is what it means to be kind.

Jesus’s parable of the good Samaritan in Luke 10 demonstrates kindness well. The question Jesus asks after telling the story of the beaten man who was helped—not by the religious leaders but by the Samaritan, who belonged to a class of people despised for not upholding the Jewish law—has to do with who acted as neighbor to the beaten man. Neighbor in this context is very similar to kin: the person near you, associated with you. The person who acted as kin—kindly—was, of course, the lowly Samaritan.

Another, more subtle observation about kindness can be made from the story of King Solomon’s wise judgment in the dispute between two women, each claiming an infant as her own (1 Kings 3:16–28). One woman had accidentally smothered her child in the night and swapped her dead child for the other woman’s living child. Unable to tell which woman was the true mother of the living child, Solomon stated he would settle the matter simply by dividing the child in two and giving one half to each. The woman who agreed to this horrific solution obviously was not the child’s mother. She would prefer for the living child to be dead than for the other woman to have what she no longer had. Her response reveals both her envy and her lack of kinship to the child. The child’s true mother reveals both her kinship and her kindness in desiring the good of the child, his very life, even if the other woman were to have him instead of her.

It’s not a very nice story. But this story that illustrates kindness also illustrates how kindness is not always nice. If kindness means treating someone like family, then kindness must include all the varieties of ways that family members show love for one another through the entire range of circumstances, conditions, and situations they find themselves in. Sometimes loving a family member requires gentleness. Sometimes toughness. Often forbearance. Always honesty and truth.

This is another way being kind and being nice differ. Niceness has no inherent link to truth. Indeed, being connected etymologically to ignorance, niceness might have no connection to truth at all. Even the current sense of nice—agreeable or pleasant—can be at odds with the truth. The truth is often not pleasant or agreeable. A mere acquaintance might be nice enough to say that your new hairstyle is attractive even if it isn’t, but a true friend—someone who is more like family—would be kind to point out that another style is more suited to you. The virtue of kindness simply cannot be separated from truth.

KIND TO BE CRUEL

Even “a harsh truth can be compassionate in the sense that it speeds us along from falseness to truth,”8 explains George Saunders, one of today’s most remarkable writers. Saunders is a satirist, treating vice and folly humorously for the purpose of correction, but his satire is not as straightforward as what we saw in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. The classical satirist sits outside in judgment, much like the omniscient narrator of Tom Jones. But Saunders stoops down to get inside his characters, to inhabit them, and to correct the errors of both the character and the reader by modeling sincere loving-kindness rather than distant mockery.

In one interview, Saunders was asked about his statement that “satire is a way of saying, ‘I love this culture.’” He explained: “It’s hard to be sufficiently involved in satirizing something you don’t like. That’s just sneering. Satire is, I think, a sort of bait-and-switch. You decide to satirize something, so you gaze at it hard enough and long enough to be able to say something true and funny and maybe angry or critical—but you first had to gaze at it for a long time. I mean, gazing is a form of love, right?”9

Saunders relates that when he was growing up, telling funny stories about people was part of his family and social life, “ostensibly for laughs, or to mock somebody out.” But behind these “odd little Zen parables,” as he calls them, “were deeper questions looming—like who we are, and what the hell are we doing here, how should we love, what should we value, how are we to understand this veil [sic] of tears?”10

Saunders’s fame exploded even beyond his impressive literary reputation (he has won many of the world’s most prestigious literary awards) with his 2013 commencement speech at Syracuse University, which went viral. In the speech’s most moving and memorable line, Saunders tells the graduates, “What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.” Such failures include, Saunders goes on to explain, “those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded . . . sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.”11

Being kind—being like family—is so much more than being sensible, reserved, or mild. It is so much more than being nice.

Think about what family members do for and with one another: Family members share space and meals. They share bathrooms and bedrooms. They witness one another’s bodily sounds and smells. They argue over who should get the last red velvet cupcake, who they should vote for to be president, and whose turn it is to clean up the dog’s vomit on the living-room rug. Family members share funny and embarrassing stories about one another. They infuse one another’s memories into one another, and their stories get passed down time and time again through the years until they aren’t even sure who had the experience and who merely observed and retold it. Family members wipe the noses and change the diapers of younger (or much, much older) family members. They are there when other members are born, win success, find love, grow old, get sick, and when they die.

This is the sort of hard kindness that permeates Saunders’s literary art. His stories are often bizarre, even surreal. They contain elements of the obscene and profane. Some might find it hard to look past these rough edges to see the kindness that is the central characteristic of Saunders’s art. But kindness, in its inherent connection to truth, must be grounded in the real. And in a postvirtuous culture, the foil that offsets kindness will be very dark indeed. It takes little for a glimmer of kindness to burn bright in such an age. One psychoanalytic study of kindness suggests, “Perhaps it is one of the perils of secularization, that if we no longer believe in God—in a Being who is himself invulnerable and so is capable of protecting us—we cannot avoid confronting our own relative helplessness and need for each other.”12

In Saunders’ short story “Tenth of December,” such kindness transforms not only the receivers of kindness but those who give it as well.

INTO THE WOODS

“Tenth of December” begins with a young boy named Robin trekking into the woods on a cold December day, embarking on an imaginary adventure in which he plays the hero who will rescue a damsel in distress (played in his imagination by a lovely classmate who doesn’t even know his name). As he moves along in his made-up adventure, Robin’s thoughts reveal that he is teased at school but loved at home. Eventually, Robin finds some (real) tracks in the snow and, weaving their presence into his imaginary adventure, follows them until they take him to an abandoned, but still warm, winter coat. Robin is animated by his instinctive kindness. “Something is wrong here,” Robin realizes. “A person needed a coat,” he thinks. “Even if the person was a grown-up.”13 The coat belongs to Don Eber, a fifty-three-year-old terminally ill man who has come into the woods intending to end his life.

Using a remarkable combination of third-person and stream-of-consciousness narration, the story toggles back and forth between Robin’s point of view and Don’s point of view. Saunders’s masterful skill in capturing the distinct voice of each character allows us to enter their interior world as they experience and process the events of the story. In this way, the reader directly experiences the inner story the character tells himself about what is happening as it is happening, a technique that re-creates the way we tell our own stories in our heads in our real lives.

Yet, at the same time, the reader knows more than the characters know. We are simultaneously inside a character’s head and outside it. We can thus see three stories at once: Robin’s, Don’s, and the larger story of the world beyond their inner experience. While we participate in the stories Robin and Don imagine for themselves, empathizing and feeling kinship, we also see beyond the stories they imagine, recognizing the limits and distorted perceptions of their stories, the same kind of limits and distorted perceptions that are part of our own stories that we tell ourselves about our own lives.

As the narrative point of view shifts to that of Don, we learn that he loves his family and wishes to spare them from further pain in his suffering. This is what a loving husband and father does, he thinks: “eases the burdens of those he loves.”14 Like Robin, Don wants to be a hero too.

It’s not just this, of course. Don is suffering, and his sufferings promise only to increase in coming days. Ending his life is a way for him to seize control and preempt “all future debasement.”15 Don reflects on his father’s lack of kindness earlier in his life. Don’s father and his father’s friend had “switched spouses, abandoned the switched spouses, fled together to California.” He fantasizes about forgiving them for leaving him and his mother in exchange for some “solid manly advice.”16 He also thinks about his stepfather, Allen, who was a good father to Don and a good husband to Don’s mother. Until he got sick. The dementia that set in turned Allen into a near monster. It is this terror that Don wishes to avoid in taking his own life, before his sickness does the same to him—and to his family.

He has seized this particular moment when his wife has left the house to get his medicine and he still (barely) has strength to drive the short distance and walk into the woods and do the deed. He wants to end it now. “Clean. Cleanly.”17 It is his “incredible opportunity to end things with dignity.”18

Both Robin and Don imagine that their current courses of action are heroic. But what both they and the reader will see when the characters’ paths converge is that everyday kindness can be the greatest sort of heroism. Kindness changes the stories we imagine for ourselves by letting in other people who will change the outcome of the story.

When Don spies the boy carrying his coat in search of him, even his weakened mind is troubled at the thought of a child stumbling across the scene of death he is about to create. He doesn’t want to traumatize a child like this. After all, he has two kids of his own, grown now. He has thought to end his life so as to spare “the ones he loves from painful last images that might endure for a lifetime.”19 Yet here is this boy, not one of his loved ones, but a total stranger. If he kills himself here in the woods as planned, then he will be imposing on this stranger, a mere child who might stumble upon him, a painful image that would likely endure for a lifetime. “That could scar a kid,” he thinks.20 He remembers how when he was a kid he found a picture of his father naked with a woman who wasn’t his mother and how this traumatized him.

As he contemplates this unexpected obstacle to his suicide plan, he suddenly sees that the boy has fallen through the ice on the pond in his attempt to find him and bring him his coat. As sick and feeble as he is in body, mind, and spirit, Don reacts:

Suddenly he was not purely the dying guy who woke nights in the med-bed thinking, Make this not true make this not true, but again, partly, the guy who used to put bananas in the freezer, then crack them on the counter and pour chocolate over the broken chunks, the guy who’d once stood outside a classroom window in a rainstorm to see how Jodi was faring with that little red-headed s—— who wouldn’t give her a chance at the book table, the guy who used to hand-paint bird feeders in college and sell them on weekends in Boulder, wearing a jester hat and doing a little juggling routine he’d—

He started to fall again, caught himself, froze in a hunched-over position, hurtled forward, fell flat on his face, chucked his chin on a root.

You had to laugh.

You almost had to laugh.

He got up. Got doggedly up.21

In giving up death in order to save the life of a stranger, Don recovers his true self, the one that includes his dying but doesn’t forget his life, his living. His kindness to the boy reminds him of his kinship with his family, with whom he belongs both in life and in death.

When he finally reaches the pond, the boy has reached the shore on his own but is at risk of losing his life to hypothermia. Don takes the wet clothes off the boy (remembering, as he does so, undressing his own children for bed years ago), removes his own outer garments, puts them on the boy, and urges him toward home “in a grave fatherly way.”22

Robin breaks from Don and runs across the field home, and doing so, he experiences an epiphany, an important turning point. Still in shock from his near drowning and near freezing, he cannot yet recollect or process his physical ordeal. But he suddenly, quietly realizes that his reason for entering the woods this day—to immerse himself in a fantasy game—has been mere foolishness. He sees how “stupid” it was, “talking in your head to some girl who in real life called you Roger.”23

Robin’s adolescent-sized epiphany points to the larger one in the story, the one in which all the meaning of the tale culminates. Robin’s release of his romantic, illusory thinking parallels the epiphany Don has as a result of this day, this ordinary day, the tenth of December.

OUT OF THE WOODS

Just before Robin’s mother finds him shivering in the cold, Don, having sacrificed his own warmth in order to cover Robin with his clothes, realizes how wrongheaded he’d been in thinking he would serve his family by ending his life. “You couldn’t leave a couple of little kids behind,”24 he realizes in horror. “What a cruel thing. Suddenly he saw clearly how cruel it was. And selfish. Oh God.”25 Robin’s mother takes Don, this stranger who has saved her son’s life, to her home. There Don begins to realize what he had done in choosing life, both his own and Robin’s. He is filled with a renewed joy in life: “What a thing! To go from dying in your underwear in the snow to this! Warmth, colors, antlers on the walls, an old-time crank phone like you saw in silent movies. It was something. Every second was something. He hadn’t died in his shorts by a pond in the snow. The kid wasn’t dead. He’d killed no one. Ha! Somehow he’d got it all back. Everything was good now.”26

Robin comes into the room, sheepish and still shivering. He takes Don’s hand in his and apologizes for running from him in fear. Don responds, “You did amazing. You did perfect. I’m here. Who did that?” Then he thinks to himself, “There. That was something you could do. The kid maybe felt better now? He’d given the kid that? That was a reason. To stay around. Wasn’t it? Can’t console anyone if not around? Can’t do squat if gone?”27

This is merely the outer edge of Don’s epiphany. As we move closer to the end of the narrative, we move to the heart of the story. Choosing life is about more than sticking around to give love to others, as priceless a part of life as this is. Choosing life is also about receiving love. When his wife arrives in search of her missing husband, she is weighted with all the emotions a human being might know:

She came in flustered and apologetic, a touch of anger in her face. He’d embarrassed her. He saw that. He’d embarrassed her by doing something that showed she hadn’t sufficiently noticed him needing her. She’d been too busy nursing him to notice how scared he was. She was angry at him for pulling this stunt and ashamed of herself for feeling angry at him in his hour of need, and was trying to put the shame and anger behind her now so she could do what might be needed.

All of this was in her face. He knew her so well.

Also concern.28

He knew her so well. “Kindness is a way of knowing people beyond our understanding of them.”29 It is “the ability to bear the vulnerability of others, and therefore oneself.”30 Such knowing and being known comes only in the tedium of day-to-day life together:

When they were first married they used to fight. Say the most insane things. Afterward, sometimes there would be tears. Tears in bed? Somewhere. And then they would—Molly pressing her hot wet face against his hot wet face. They were sorry, they were saying with their bodies, they were accepting each other back, and that feeling, that feeling of being accepted back again and again, of someone’s affection for you always expanding to encompass whatever new flawed thing had just manifested in you, that was the deepest, dearest thing he’d ever—

Overriding everything else in that lovely face was concern.

She came to him now, stumbling a bit on a swell in the floor of this stranger’s house.31

The connection between the house of a stranger and the kinship of love is powerful and paradoxical. Kindness “opens us up to the world (and worlds) of other people in ways that we both long for and dread.”32 Kindness makes us vulnerable. It’s an acknowledgment of our interdependence and therefore risky.33 Yet the very thing “we have in common is our vulnerability.”34 Being kind brings other people into the stories that are in our heads. This can change their lives, and our own, in ways we can’t predict.

Earlier, just before his reunion with his wife, Don pauses one more time to consider whether he really wants to continue living, knowing the days he has left are numbered and will be filled with great pain. “Oh, Lord,” he thinks, “there was still all that to go through.”

Did he still want it? Did he still want to live?

Yes, yes, oh, God, yes, please.

Because, O.K., the thing was—he saw it now, was starting to see it—if some guy, at the end, fell apart, and said or did bad things, or had to be helped, helped to quite a considerable extent? So what? What of it? Why should he not do or say weird things or look strange or disgusting? Why should the s—— not run down his legs? Why should those he loved not lift and bend and feed and wipe him, when he would gladly do the same for them? He’d been afraid to be lessened by the lifting and bending and feeding and wiping, and was still afraid of that, and yet, at the same time, now saw that there could still be many—many drops of goodness, is how it came to him—many drops of happy—of good fellowship—ahead, and those drops of fellowship were not—had never been—his to [withhold].35

I’ve read this passage many times. It pierces me each time.

You see, I am so terribly, terribly afraid of dying. My own dying and other people’s dying and animals’ dying. I am afraid of the lifting and bending and feeding and wiping to come. I am afraid of the blood and the fluids and the suffering and the pain. I am afraid of being weak, sick, immobile, demented, blind, deaf—whatever of these might come to me and to those I love.

I know such fears are natural and normal. But I know, too, that these fears are amplified by the false values of a culture that idolizes youth, beauty, health, and—most of all—productivity. I was raised on the Protestant work ethic, and productivity is my love language. Such values get absorbed by our minds and are poured back out in the way we order our lives.

And the way we order our deaths.

Suicide has hit my family and me hard. The death of my father-in-law was eerily like the one that Don Eber planned for himself. Unlike Don, my father-in-law went through with his plans. Stoic and independent to a fault, my father-in-law thought the most rational thing he could do when he became terminally ill would be to treat himself like the animals he sometimes found in the traps placed in the woods where he often roamed: put them out of their misery.

Like Don, he waited until his wife went on a brief errand, leaving him alone in the home where he figured he was going to die anyway. Don Eber realized in time the sort of impact a scene of self-inflicted death has on those who come upon it. My father-in-law did not.

The physical aftermath he left for his grown children, including my husband, to tend to is, I suppose, the kind of thing soldiers go through, find impossible to talk about, and carry with them for the rest of their lives. His widow and children have had to bear feelings of guilt, wondering what they could have done that might have influenced my father-in-law not to make this choice. My husband has had to go without a father for nearly all of his adult life.

For those so sick or scared or depressed that they think their loved ones would be better off without them, I so wish for them to know what Don Eber came to know: caring for these bodies we inhabit for a while—whether that care is of our own or someone else’s body—isn’t a distraction from what life is all about. It is what life is all about.

In lieu of death, be kind to one another.