My grandmother died in March of 2014, and I was the one who called everybody.
I called my uncle in Arizona and her oldest friend and the man from the church who needed to know about the hall. I picked the reading.
I stood at the door afterward and thanked ninety people for coming, and I noticed the sandwiches had been cut wrong, and I let it go.
I didn’t cry once. Not in the room, not at the service, not in the car.
A week or so later I was in bed with my phone, and a video came up of a boy at an arrivals gate, maybe three years old.
He was doing that stiff-legged run children do when the body is going faster than they can manage it. His father was in uniform and knelt down with both arms out.
I came apart. Hand over my mouth, shoulders going, crying at ninety seconds of two people I will never meet.
My first thought was that something in me is pointed the wrong way around, and that I can get through my grandmother’s funeral but not a stranger’s homecoming.
It turns out this is one of the most ordinary things a person can do, and it’s been measured in nineteen countries.
The feeling is called kama muta
It’s Sanskrit, and it means moved by love. Alan Fiske, an anthropologist at UCLA, worked on it for years with a group of psychologists in Oslo, mostly because English never got around to giving it a word of its own.
They put it to 3,543 people across nineteen countries on five continents, and the same handful of things kept coming back. Wet eyes, goosebumps, a warm feeling in the chest, a lift afterward, and the urge to go do something for somebody.
What sets it off is the piece that explains the arrivals gate. Not sadness, and not beauty either. What does it is a bond between two people getting suddenly stronger, somewhere it can be seen happening.
Fiske has a name for it: a sudden intensification of communal sharing.
Fiske uses his own grandson as the example. He loves the boy every day of his life, and all that steady love has never once made him cry.
It was the afternoon the kid came over, took his hand and asked him to come for a walk. Same two people, same amount of love. Something in it moved a few inches closer, and a grown man’s eyes went wet over a walk.
A stranger’s story arrives with the ending attached
The video is ninety seconds long. It hands over a bond, a problem, and a reunion, and then it stops. There’s nobody to call. No forms. Nobody’s feelings to manage on the way through it.
My grandmother’s death came with none of that shape and all of the errands. A hold line at the bank and a recorded voice thanking me for my patience. A death certificate that needed six copies.
A neighbor’s casserole dish sitting clean on my counter for five weeks, because giving it back meant standing in a doorway having the conversation.
Nothing is known about the two people in the video either. Whether the father is any good at it, or whether he snapped at somebody in the security line an hour before.
Or whether the woman filming has done every school run alone for eleven months and is furious about it.
None of that is available to me, so none of it gets weighed. A man knelt down and a small boy ran, and that’s the whole file.
My file is thick with everything. Somebody said the wrong thing at the hall, and one cousin didn’t come at all.
And I hadn’t driven up to see my grandma since Christmas, because it’s four hours each way and there was always going to be a better weekend.
There’s no clean feeling to be had about any of that, because every part of it comes attached to an argument.
And the whole way through, I was the one everybody kept checking on. The version where I sit down on the curb outside the church and stop working is a version somebody else would have had to manage.
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The crying isn’t coming from sadness
In one study, people watched a run of moving videos, among them an elephant rescue and a performance, and rated what they felt as it was happening, second by second, instead of trying to remember afterward.
Being moved rose and fell along with warmth in the chest, wet eyes, goosebumps, and how close the people in the video seemed to be getting. It had no relationship to sadness.
Which sounds like a technicality until I hold it up against my own list.
I cried at a proposal filmed in a grocery store parking lot from four cars away, the woman putting both hands flat over her face and staying there a long time.
I cried at a wedding toast from a brother who is not a talker, reading four sentences off a piece of paper he’d folded and unfolded until it came apart at the crease.
I cried at a woman standing in her driveway being told by a reporter that the town had raised the money, saying okay, okay, okay, because there was nothing else in her to say.
None of it is sad. All of it is two people ending up closer together than they were a minute before, out in the open, where somebody could watch it happen.
Sometimes the composure is avoidance
I can’t rule out the less flattering explanation for myself, and it would be convenient to.
Some people get through a hard year in one piece because it’s being taken a day at a time, and the feeling gets its turn later, alone, in a parked car with the engine off.
Other people get through it because the feeling never gets a turn at all, and a video of a stranger is the one place it’s allowed out.
From the outside, those two look identical, and the crying doesn’t separate them.
The question I’ve found more use for is whether one person alive has heard me say the flat sentence out loud, with no joke stuck on the end of it. That was a bad year.
Not the tidy version I hand a coworker in a hallway. The plain one, said to somebody who was allowed to sit there while I said it.
It took me until August to do that, and it was harder than the phone calls in March.
The kindness goes to strangers first
Saying it out loud to somebody else was the easier half of it.
Kristin Neff has spent her career on self-compassion, and the finding underneath all of it is small and a little embarrassing. Most people say things to themselves they would never say about a stranger, let alone about anyone close to them.
Ask them why and the answer is usually some version of the same thing. They believe the harshness is holding the whole structure up. Ease off, and they’ll go slack, miss the deadline, let people down, stop being the one who handles things.
Neff’s work says it runs the other way. People who go easier on themselves keep the same standards and take failure better, which means they’re back on their feet and onto the next thing sooner.
Put it in a room, and it’s obvious.
There was a week in January when my grandmother asked me twice on the phone about the same appointment, and I was short with her about it.
I have thought about that week more than I have thought about the funeral.
If a friend called me tonight and read out that same week as her own, I’d know what to say before she finished. I’d say it warmly, and I’d mean every word. You did everything anybody could have done.
Point the identical facts back at me, and that is not the sentence that arrives.
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Who the feeling was for
The funeral got the version of me that makes the phone calls. A stranger’s boy running at his father got everything else, on a night I would have said there was nothing left in me at all.
So the feeling was never gone, and it was never pointed the wrong way around either. August is the proof. It came out in the end, to somebody who sat there and waited.
I didn’t keep those tears from my grandmother. She was long past needing them. I kept them from myself.
