Reply #31: My grandmother's funeral gave me the occasion for one of the BEST [View All]

"smackdown" moments in my life. I *FINALLY* realized one of the most important truths in life:

I don't have to be nice to people who aren't nice to me.

Now, that may be obvious to the rest of the planet, but it was really an eye opening shock to me. I didn't have to be nice to people who weren't nice to me. Wow. In fact, if they were nasty and obnoxious to me, I could be nasty and obnoxious right back. All that "be the better person" crap just made me an object of ridicule and contempt, and if I enjoyed the martyr role, I could keep right on doing what I had been doing, because THEY certainly weren't going to change.

So, I had myself a little attitude adjustment, and one of my sisters walked right into it. She'd been being rude, obnoxious and just generally nasty (in other words "normal"), and I'm afraid that I wasn't in a generally tolerant mood. (In addition to dealing with my grandmother's death, I was in the middle of my second miscarriage, which started the day my grandmother died, and there wasn't a helluva lot of sympathy or support from the vast majority of the family -- did I mention they aren't "nice" people?)

Anyway, we were all sitting in the "downstairs" of the funeral home (where you are able to get a cup of coffee, or have something to drink) around a table when one of my nieces started asking about death. She was sixteen at the time, and she didn't want to know about the PHYSICAL process of it -- she wanted to know what happens NEXT. I told her that it depends on what religion you are about what you believe, and then explained some people believe in reincarnation, and that you come back again in a different body, while some people believe in Heaven, and others don't believe in anything at all. She wanted more details, so I looked around the table, and said well, I don't know what your mother believes, and your Aunt (XXX) obviously isn't a Christian and ---

At which point Aunt (XXX) (one of my sisters) jumped up IN A RAGE and said "HOW DARE YOU SAY I'M NOT A CHRISTIAN? I AM TOO A CHRISTIAN? HOW DARE YOU -- "

To which I replied very calmly, "I'm just basing my judgment ON HOW YOU BEHAVE." And then I turned around to continue my conversation with my niece. My sister sputtered some more nasty type comments, I looked at her with a raised eye brow, and said, "thank you for proving my point some more," and then finished the conversation with my niece before excusing myself to the bathroom where I did a little victory dance.

My grandmother, a cantankerous old biddy, would have been proud. And my sister started behaving better the next day.

Lesson learned? Punching back removes the target sign...at least in my family. Sigh.