Karunyah, we are sorry!

A nurse died last week, allegedly by suicide.

Now let that sink in.

For almost two years now, healthcare professionals sacrificed their time, rest, and friendships to care for us all, patients or otherwise.

For nurses like Karunyah Paskaran, home was a trip up north; a car trip or a flight away.

The hospital ward was literally their adopted home. The flats they live in Singapore was merely a place where they shower and freshen up. It was cold hard mortar.

Their mental health and personal struggles echoes deafeningly in this lonely space and their minds. The struggle is real.

They yearn to go back home. But never did.

In a ministerial statement in Parliament on 1 Nov, Senior Minister of State for Health Janil Puthucheary stated that resignation rates among healthcare workers are going up. Dr Janil mentioned that “foreign healthcare workers have also resigned in bigger numbers, especially when they are unable to travel to see their families back home.”

But Karunyah stayed. We owe her a debt of gratitude. But in her death, there was no news of her passing. Probably, it was because of the circumstances of her death.

There was not even a word uttered in our national media.

If we are stigmatising her alleged suicide, we are stigmatising the loneliness, depression, the homesickness and personal struggles of every one of our nurses in Singapore.

If we are stigmatising her alleged suicide, we deny recognising her contributions as a healthcare professional.

If her death was so uncomfortable and problematic to us and the bureaucracy she worked for, we are simply hypocrites.

She has a story to tell. She was a hero, our heroine.  She held fort, she took whatever that the pandemic threw at us, but in her death, she was a byword.

She was an angel. We showered her with platitudes but today she is merely a statistic.

What was utterly mistaken and misplaced was not her death, or the circumstances of her death, but how we, as a society, responded to the death of a nurse who bore the brunt of distress and helplessness.

In life, her family members, according to her Facebook post on 12 Nov, were “hundreds of miles away but closest to [her] heart”.

Karunyah wanted so badly to go home. She has now gone home, in a casket, to heartbroken parents whom she loved dearly and abundantly.

No amount of “Thank you” will do justice to your service to Singapore and Singaporeans during the pandemic. We would not even attempt to do a cliched gesture of gratitude.

Karunyah, Singapore is where you gave us your all. We’ve disappointed you. I am sorry, we are so very sorry.

We failed to look out for you. We are sorry.