RIP Prince Philip
Grief is the price is the price we pay for love
As pretty much everyone knows, Prince Philip died last week and was laid to rest yesterday. Due to COVID restrictions in the UK, Queen Elizabeth, Philip’s wife of over 73 years, sat by herself at the public service. The various members of the royal family were all separated by household, 2 meters apart, and wearing masks. The congregation was limited to 30 people. Those are the UK COVID restrictions for funerals.
As seems to often be the case, the Queen did the more difficult thing, in this case by adhering to the rules that her subjects must adhere to, instead of expecting to be exempt to them. There are probably ways that the restrictions could have been adjusted so that someone could sit with her. Charles and the Queen could have gotten COVID tests to make sure they are both negative, or he could have quarantined with the Queen ahead of the funeral. Whatever was done could have been announced and explained, but the Queen didn’t do this. Who knows if anything other than following the restrictions was even considered? Most wealthy politicians and celebrities do not think they need to comply with the rules that lesser mortals must obey, so I admire her for doing it.
That being said, I think the UK rules are excessive and, if at times of joy and grief, we cannot figure out a way to relax these rules then maybe we have our priorities wrong. To me, it just isn’t a balanced approach to life and risk if we treat frat parties the same way we treat funerals or a weddings. We don’t need frat parties, we do need funerals with some degree of normalcy, such as the widow not sitting by herself. But, that is not how we are doing things these days, is it?
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