They Bring Flowers When You’re Dead
- Aug 18
- 7 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
On institutional disposability, belated recognition, and the people universities learn from too late.
Roslyn Thomas-Long got me into the university.
She taught in the Transitional Year Programme, a programme created to open a door that the university had long kept closed to many Black students. She did not simply work there. She believed in what it could mean. She understood that access was not charity, but justice. She also studied the institution itself—how resources were distributed, how students survived, and what happened when universities invited people in without making it possible for them to remain.
I did not know, when I first entered through that door, how much I would later come to understand what she had been writing about.
That is the part that stays with me.
Not simply that universities can be cruel. Not simply that Black students and Black academics encounter racism, precarity, neglect, and exclusion in places that speak endlessly about equity, access, and belonging.
We know that.
What troubles me is how often the same pattern appears, even when the circumstances differ. What troubles me is how quickly institutions behave as though each case is isolated, unfortunate, and unrelated to all the others that came before it.
The circumstances differ.
The institutional response rhymes.
Roslyn’s story was not my story. My story is not Jason Arday’s story. Jason Arday’s story is not Sandra Bland’s story. And yet, across those differences, I keep returning to the same question:
At what point does an institution decide that preserving the person is no longer worth the trouble?
I ask that because I have lived close enough to the answer to feel its shape.
When I insisted on support during my own time at the university, I was not asking for luxury. I was asking for help in conditions that made study and survival difficult. I asked, and asked again. I documented. I pushed. I refused to quietly absorb what should not have been mine alone to carry.
Eventually I was given a letter by faculty. They called it a “comprehensive letter.” In reality, it was a narrowing of the relationship. It let me know that I would be responded to only in relation to my degree. Not as a full human being in crisis. Not as someone requiring meaningful support. Not as someone whose circumstances demanded care. Only as an administrative matter.
They did not have to literally expel me to begin cancelling me.
They could cancel the relationship while keeping the file open.
That is one of the truths I wish more people understood about institutions. Disposal does not always look dramatic. Sometimes it comes as procedure. Sometimes it comes as silence. Sometimes it comes as increasingly restricted communication. Sometimes it arrives in polite language that says, in effect: from here on, we will deal only with the narrowest version of you.
This is why “cancel culture” feels too small a phrase for what I am trying to name.
Institutional Disposability
What I am talking about is not a social media pile-on. It is not simply public shaming. It is something colder, quieter, and more administrative.
It is institutional disposability.
A person becomes isolated.
Their requests are individualized.
Their difficulty becomes their difficulty.
The institution continues functioning.
Those nearby may sympathize but not mobilize.
And eventually there are too few witnesses making enough noise to alter the outcome.
That, to me, is where the deeper harm lives.
Because the problem is not only what the institution does. It is also what the institution allows itself not to do. It allows itself not to fight. Not to intervene. Not to insist. Not to be inconvenienced enough by someone else’s suffering to meaningfully change course while that person still stands in need.
When students like myself advocated for TYP, Roslyn became collateral damage. We tried. We pushed. We cared. But it is difficult to advocate when so few people turn up. It is difficult to create urgency when concern is thinly spread and easily ignored. Roslyn was liked, but being liked did not alter her circumstances. She did not inspire enough institutional or public attention to produce the kind of pressure that forces change. The administration did not fight for her.
That matters.
Because affection is not protection.
Respect is not protection.
Being known is not protection.
And neither, I learned, is being right.
I reached out. I made the case. I named what was happening. Still, student groups and administration did not find me popular enough to be concerned. That may sound harsh, but institutions are often more responsive to pressure than to principle. They speak in the language of fairness, but they often move according to visibility, influence, reputation, and consequence.
How many people will come when your name is called?
That is not supposed to be the measure of whether someone receives support. Yet too often it is.
This is one of the painful differences that comes into view when I think about someone like Jason Arday. His circumstances were different. His public profile was different. His popularity was different. And perhaps, as research on Black women repeatedly suggests, his gender also made him more intelligible to a world that too often receives Black women through suspicion, irritation, or dismissal rather than concern. I do not say that to flatten his suffering or deny the complexity of his situation. I say it because Black women know very well that credibility is not distributed equally, and neither is sympathy.
And then there is Sandra Bland.
So often we remember Sandra Bland only through the violence that ended her life. We remember the traffic stop, the jail cell, the outrage, the hashtag. But before she became a symbol, she was also a young Black woman in higher education—politically engaged, intellectually alive, and still becoming. She was not only a victim of state violence. She was an up-and-coming Black academic whose future should have been allowed to unfold.
That, too, is part of the violence.
Black people are so often remembered through the moment of their destruction rather than through the fullness of who they were becoming. With Sandra Bland, as with so many Black women, the public remembers the harm more readily than the horizon. We recall the manner of her death more quickly than the magnitude of her becoming.
That is not incidental to this essay. It is central to it.
Because whether the setting is a university, an institution, or the state itself, Black women are too often made most visible when harmed and least visible while they are still living, building, thinking, needing, and becoming. Their pain becomes legible more easily than their promise.
So while the circumstances differ, the responses do not differ as much as we like to think.
Belated Recognition
A person can be admired and still left exposed.
A person can be accomplished and still become disposable.
A person can be the reason an institution later learns, reforms, and congratulates itself—and still not have been protected when protection mattered.
That is the heart of what I mean by belated recognition.
Belated recognition is what happens when an institution fails to respond adequately while a person is still inside the crisis, then later absorbs the lessons produced by that person’s suffering. Later, people discover the story. Committees review things. Policies change. Memorials happen. Lessons are supposedly learned.
The institution improves itself using knowledge purchased with somebody else’s suffering.
That sentence is difficult, but I believe it is true.
Changes were made within the institution following much of what happened to me, but never in time to be beneficial to me. That is another form of violence we do not speak about enough. Reform can become a way for institutions to narrate themselves as evolving, thoughtful, and responsive while quietly avoiding the fact that the person whose pain made the reform necessary was never helped in time.
What does institutional change mean when it consistently arrives too late for the people whose suffering produced it?
That question lives at the centre of this essay.
It is also why the title remains the right one.
They Bring Flowers When You’re Dead.
The flowers are literal, yes. But they are metaphorical too.
The flowers are the policy change.
The flowers are the apology.
The flowers are the committee.
The flowers are the memorial lecture.
The flowers are the public reflection.
The flowers are the article, the statement, the promise to do better.
The flowers are everything that arrives once the person can no longer use it.
And that is the cruelty of belated recognition: what the institution refuses to recognize as a collective problem while you are suffering can later become a collective lesson once you are gone.
By then, the institution is able to say all the right things. It can acknowledge complexity. It can speak of care, contribution, and legacy. It can honour what it previously failed to sustain. It can make meaning from damage after the damage is complete.
But one question remains.
Why is recognition so often easier after harm than intervention was during it?
Why can institutions find language for grief that they could not find for support?
Why are they so often prepared to honour people they were unwilling to fight for?
That is the question Roslyn leaves with me.
That is the question my own experience leaves with me.
That is the question carried by Jason Arday, and by many others whose names do not generate enough witnesses, enough outrage, or enough institutional discomfort to alter their outcomes in time.
It is also the question that should haunt us when we say Sandra Bland’s name. Not only because of how she died, but because of what was interrupted. Not only because harm occurred, but because a Black woman’s thought, future, leadership, and becoming were collapsed into a public story of suffering.
This is not simply about individuals. It is about a culture. A culture in which people can be admitted, praised, used, mishandled, isolated, and discarded—and only later become legible as losses.
We like to imagine that institutions are at their best when they celebrate people.
I am no longer convinced.
I think institutions reveal far more about themselves in the moments when someone becomes inconvenient, vulnerable, difficult to contain, or costly to ignore.
That is where we learn whether equity was ever more than language.
That is where we learn who is considered worth fighting for.
That is where we learn whose distress counts as urgent, whose potential is seen as valuable, and whose disappearance can be absorbed without too much disruption.
And that is where too many Black people—students, staff, and faculty alike—discover that care often arrives dressed as tribute, long after it might have saved something worth saving.
They bring flowers when you’re dead.
The question is why they could not bring care while you were still alive enough to receive it.
Continue Exploring
This essay is part of The Syllabus No One Gave Me, a living project for recognizing institutional harm, asking better questions, and surviving school without being left to carry it alone.
The Syllabus teaches the pattern. The Black Academic Loss & Survival Archive remembers the people and cases that make the pattern visible.
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Grandma Knows Best offers workshops and community conversations on institutional harm, care, grief, survival and the knowledge people carry after systems fail them.
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