This is a Good Samaritan story that revolves around the New York September 11 tragedy. It’s a true and amazing reminder of the power of love and forgiveness – or of fate at the least.

My Grandmother, 80, is such a charming lady. She’s from Dublin, as is my Grandfather, and both going strong. They moved to Australia in the late ’60s but they both still have their wonderful Irish brogue and their cheeky sense of humour.

Being of an Irish Catholic family, and the era being as it were, my Grandfather was blessed with 12 brothers and sisters. And Ireland being what it was then, most of them left for foreign shores. Some of them made it to New York and apparently there is still a brood of my maternal bloodline going strong there.

Now it was one of this brood, one of my Grandfather’s sisters, that had a husband once, with whom she had children, but at some point they separated or divorced. For what reason I am not sure, but apparently he did the wrong thing by her and the family, and was out on his ear.

As it happened, or as I remember being told anyway, one day in 2001, many years after their separation and consequent estrangement, she stumbled across her ex-husband lying in the street, down-and-out. Since they had parted ways he had fallen on hard times and become a homeless man and very much in poor health too.

Despite his former failures as a husband and father to her children, the good woman took pity on the man and paid for him to go to hospital (which, apparently, does not come free in the USA, even when you’re on death’s door).

There he was looked after. But it was too late: the man was was dying.

By now their children, who had lost contact with their father before he was rediscovered, were adults. Their son was supposed to go to work but as his newly unearthed father was ill, he took the day off to visit his Dad in hospital.

Unfortunately the old man died that day – but his wasted life and his passing were not in vain.

You see – his son, the very same that visited him in the hospital the day he died, worked in one of the Twin Towers.

And if that good woman, the old man’s former wife, had not taken pity on the man who had done her and the children wrong so many years before – if she had not forgiven him his failings – her own son would most likely have died that day when the airplanes struck the towers.

Makes you think doesn’t it?

What repercussions will our actions have?

In my opinion, the story can be taken on two levels:

One: do the right thing by others because Karma can be a … beautiful thing.

Two: before you beat yourself up for being a loser human being, consider that your (apparently) imperfect life, with all its failings and weaknesses, may in fact exist as part of some divine plan for the better.

Maybe – just MAYBE – the reason you consistently suck is so that somebody worthy may live on to kick awesome butt.

Maybe…