To me the question is not about why care for them, but what caring is and/or means.
I think this is where people confuse caring and having emotional attachments, and basically what's behind the forgive and forget confusion. You don't have to feel good or any particular way about a person to care about them, for example I'm sure most of us would help an old JW acquaintance if we saw them on the side of the road, injured from a car accident. This doesn't mean you have to feel like they're your buddy again, it's just a matter of caring enough for a fellow human being.
What happens in a situation like this is you have some conflict with your feelings about the matter, right? Certain emotions basically become fused with your idea of showing respect and what not, just as you associate certain emotions with your relationship with a particular person based on the past, but they are actually different things. Your relationship with people change too, and therefore your feelings toward the person will change and so on. Since relationship is dynamic and unique there can be no exact way you should act, so it will just depend on your specific situation.
Caring is not a matter of having certain emotions, I think it's atleast obviously it does not necessarily involve strong emotions. People get so identified with how they feel that they start thinking "this is how so and so MAKES ME feel" - which is true in a way, if you are reacting out of unconscious conditioned response. Then again, from where I stand I don't even see how that's you if you're not even conscious of it, how does so and so make WHO feel? You are certainly more than the triggers that you have, so to me that is strictly a mechanical process of stimulus and response, you can only say that is something you are experiencing at best. The thing is, if caring is done out of a good feeling we have, then it's really not caring, it's just more unconscious behavior, and there is no consideration in that.
Now I want to be clear that I do not put any of this here as something to judge yourself by, it's just intended to allow us to understand what happens. Most people do have things that they get caught with to some degree, nobody is saying you need to be a saint. My hope is by distinguishing things and seeing what's what, we can be free from those emotional attachments. Of course, if you are attached and caught in some way and you know it, there is no need to be attached to THAT in the sense of I gotta change that, and I had to change it yesterday. I say give yourself a break, atleast allow enough time to sort things out or settle a bit.
