BY PHILIP LARKIN
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.
It was... odd to just go back to work. Because not only could you not get medical treatment, we were also forbidden to gather to mourn the inevitable victims of our failed health care policies. Or comfort the bereaved- her husband was absolutely devastated and had to grieve alone, unable to even find closure by having a funeral. He became a shell of his former self and has only now managed to pull things together enough to hold a memorial for her.
I have been angry about a lot of things over the last two years: this is up near the top of the list. I'm angry about the doctors who refused to see patients in person for the better part of two years. I'm also angry that hospitals prioritized covid to the point of ignoring many far more serious ailments. Now, I'm not saying that my coworker wouldn't have died from her cancer anyway- she very well could have- but because of the neglect she experienced at the hands of our health care system, she never had a fighting chance. And she's far from the only one; there have been and will be many more victims. And I'm angry at the casual cruelty of a government which would criminalize a basic human need: that of gathering with family and friends to grieve the loss of a loved one.
The poem I pasted at the top of this post advises us to treat each other kindly while there is time to do so; we live in an uncertain world and we none of us know our allotted time in it. This is good advice. But it is not kind to look the other way when someone is ill, neglecting their treatment simply because it happens at an inconvenient time. It's not kind to isolate people who are bereaved and in pain, to deny them the comfort of human compassion and care. And it's not kind to allow this to ever happen again. It must never be allowed to happen again.