Or at least nice to you when you are at your lowest of the lows.
Speaking of nice, what exactly does being nice refer to, and how do you be that?
The thing is, although it may seem that I am about to lecture you on niceness, I, too, have a very vague understanding of it.
Just the other day, I was thinking about a friend and how abruptly I got out of touch with her. At first, I thought it was an end, but here's a truth slap: getting out of touch doesn't put an end to a relationship. Here, in this case, the relationship was a friendship. I admit I was not bosom to her, and she already had a clan, and where in the clan I stood, was in the peripheral.
Anyway, back to the niceness topic.
Like I have said, I have had a hazy grasp on niceness, but later in life, I understood that it is how to be "appropriately nice" to someone in distress that counts, and that's the point where everyone, including the people of my circle, falls short.
It is always in the propriety of niceness that people expect. And I have tried very hard to be an ideal friend in that regard. But that's all in the past.
Now, let me explain how the appropriateness of niceness and out-of-touch friendship are connected.
It all started almost five years back when grief engulfed me when my father was gone. Losing my father broke me in ways I can never fully mend.
That's it! I have said it, "I can never fully mend".
But when my father's permanent absence became my permanent reality, I sought the most awaited "niceness" to be woven into my life by those to whom I had been dedicating myself.
One thing about losing a parent is that when it happens, your mind stops working the way it should. You can’t quite pick the name of your emotions. All you know is the feeling of uneasiness, the unsettling heaviness in your heart, and the sense of doom that tells you something inside you has cracked forever.
And in that moment, what you hope for is more than advice, more than solutions; this becomes the time when you seek the simple kindness of others. And this is when the appropriateness of niceness enters.
It’s not about grand gestures. It’s about showing up in the right way, at the right time. Even if it means having to listen to your friend cry inconsolably for a stretch of two hours.
Well, that's I think a lot on my part to have expected and something impossible on the friend's part to offer. Instead of a listening ear, she had shown me the ways to self-heal. In place of real interaction, she would assign me to do her work for my mind's distraction. Whether the distraction was from the pain of grieving or just a good riddance, it is still unknown to me.
Nevertheless, "the inappropriate niceness on part of the friend felt more daunting than what the grief alone could do".
This prompted me to decisively decide to cut ties just to let myself heal with dignity.
It's been five years, and I am steadier now, though not whole.
Being nice is not about fixing someone, nor is it about distracting them from their pain or rushing them to move on. It is simply about being with them, even if they are not moving, having an earful of their silence, willingness to hear their sobs, and letting them know they are not alone.
Friendship doesn’t break the moment we fall out of touch, but it does fracture when we fail to show up in those hard times, the times when kindness matters most. And that’s the lesson grief carved into me, that niceness is not a casual courtesy, it is a responsibility, a presence, and sometimes the very lifeline a broken heart clings to.
And all these make me question, would I ever be able to have come through all of that with the niceness I was subjected to?
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