My notes here have been of the emotionally heavy variety lately, so today I’m thinking about something a bit lighter: the silly, the mundane… and compliments and insults.

I try to give compliments often—sometimes to people I know well, sometimes to people I’ve just met. It can be as simple as noticing someone’s shoes, their smile, or just offering a sincere thank you. Maybe it’s part of an ingrained gratitude practice, but I like that sharing something positive is free, easy, and almost always well received.

And truthfully, I tend to see the good in people. I pride myself on being able to find something kind to say about nearly everyone I meet—or even just feel like I know.

That said… I also accidentally insult people.

I’ll say something I mean innocently, and Eddie will shoot me a look and say, “That wasn’t very nice.” I’m almost always mortified. I don’t mean it, and I hate the idea that something I said might stick.

Because here’s the thing—I still remember a handful of insults directed at me over the years. They linger. “Queen of the Dodo Birds.” A sorority sister once asking why people were friends with me at all. A seamstress looking me up and down and saying, “I also do wardrobe consult.”

They stay with you.

And the irony is, the clever response—the perfect comeback—is almost always the “wit of the stairwell.” The thing you think of five minutes too late.

So why do the negative comments stick so much more than the positive ones?

I looked it up, because of course I did. And there it was — negativity bias. Right alongside recency bias and confirmation bias, like an old friend I hadn’t seen in a while. Psychology Today has a fascinating piece on why our brains are wired to cling to the bad. Knowing it has a name doesn’t make it sting less, but it helps.

Why don’t we hold onto the kind words with the same intensity? The warmth-inducing comments, the genuine compliments?

Is it because the negative feels more revealing? More motivating? (I can assure you, I rarely leave the house looking slovenly anymore.) Or do we discount the positive—assuming there’s an agenda, or brushing it off as flattery, or simply not believing it?

I often come back to the Maya Angelou line: “People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel.”

But I’ve noticed something that complicates all of this — something that only seems to happen with distance.

We soften. We remember the best in people, in places, in things. The edges blur. The negative fades. We look back with nostalgia—on stores that are long gone (I can still find in my mind where everything I need is at Hiller’s!), on people we’ve lost, even on versions of ourselves.

We remember the good.

What if we practiced a positivity bias of our own? Not naive, not forced — just intentional. Noticing the good. Saying it out loud.

Which makes me think this: if time eventually does its work—if the positive is what remains—why not be intentional about it now?

To say the kind word, to notice the small good. To leave people with a feeling they might carry longer than we realize.

Because in the end, this is legacy.

Not just what we’ve done—but how we’ve made people feel along the way. And whether, when they think of us later, what comes to mind is kindness and impact.

How are you carrying your good name forward? What small kindness are you putting out there today?

I’m always up to talk about it — over Zoom, coffee, or a walk.

Fondly,

Kari

P.S. Is there an insult or a compliment that has always stayed with you? I’d love to hear it and we can laugh about it, together. Let’s compare memories (and laughs!).

 

On complicated loss, memory, and legacy

Spoiler alert: this one isn’t as upbeat as they usually are.

I’ve written before about death and dying — about ritual, about the power of mourning traditions, about the ways we gather to mark loss. I’ve written about shiva and minyan, yahrzeits (memorials), about funerals that hold us up, about the comfort of community in moments of grief.

But what about when legacy is complicated?

What about when someone deeply troubled dies? When you lose a family member or friend who struggled throughout their life — physically, mentally, or both? When the mess someone leaves behind makes it difficult to mourn them cleanly or generously? When you always think of the ‘what if,’ and not the ‘what was.’

Not every loss is easy to hold.

And to be clear, this isn’t only about people who were overtly hurtful, or relationships defined by cruelty or estrangement. Often the relationship was real, loving, and indisputable — and still deeply complicated.

What death can offer, unexpectedly, is a kind of control-alt-delete moment. Not an erasure of what was hard or broken, but an opportunity to reset how we carry the person forward.

We don’t get to rewrite history. But we do get to choose what we keep closest. We can make a conscious decision to remember the good without pretending the rest didn’t exist.

We all know this is true. We all are part of families – born and chosen – made up of the good, the bad, and the painful. We’ve watched friends navigate losses like this. And many of us, if we’re honest, know that one day we may too.

This is where legacy enters the conversation — not as something bestowed upon us, but as something we actively shape.

When someone dies, especially someone complicated, their legacy is no longer being written by their next choice or next apology. It becomes, in part, a matter of how they are carried forward — not in denial of the truth, but with discernment about what defines the story we tell.

This doesn’t mean smoothing over harm or insisting on redemption. It means acknowledging complexity without letting it eclipse everything else. It means deciding that a person can be more than the hardest chapters of their life — and that we, too, can be more than the pain of our relationship with them.

And perhaps more importantly, these moments hold up a mirror.

They ask us to consider the legacies we are creating in real time: the relationships we are tending or neglecting, the words we choose, the care we offer, the repair we attempt. Legacy is not only what will be said about us after we’re gone; it is how we are experienced now, in the ordinary moments that accumulate over time.

We don’t always get to choose the people we inherit.
But we do get to choose what we carry forward.

What are you choosing to carry forward?

Fondly,

Kari