The 5 of Cups has always meant a lot to me. I got into tarot when I was twenty. My mother died when I was fifteen, and the first time I saw that card it pulled me right back to that feeling of not being able to hold my head together or notice what I still had. After I had some space to process it, I started thinking of it as my grief vision goggles.
Kindness is a lovely lesson to take from it. For me it's tied up with those "7 stages of grief" - feeling shocked, denial and anger, making deals, feeling down, giving and receiving hope, and dealing with grief.
When I'm reading I try to tell which stage is most present by where the card falls in the spread and the cards around it. Of course, it's often a mix.
You notice yourself feeling sorry for the person in the picture, and that can easily become sympathy for the querent's story. I hadn't thought of it that way until you mentioned it, but now every time I pull the 5 of Cups it hits my heart chakra in this gentle, compassionate way.
