By: Kevin L. Connors
With sweetest apologies to Hamlet and Shakespeare,
but we offer pause nevertheless to the Compromise and Release.
To settle or not to settle, that is the question;
Whether tis nobler in the end to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous compensation,
or to take arms against a sea of claims,
and by opposing, terminate them.
To die, to sleep; no more;
and by a compromise to say we end
The back-ache and thousand natural sighs
That this flesh is heir to-tis a constipation
Disabled be the wish we whim.
To die, to sleep; to sleep,
per chance to cash that check.
Ay, there’s the rub,
for in that release of claim
what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off
this compensation coil,
must give us pause.
There’s the respect
That makes modification of so long a claim,
For who would bear the
whips and scorns of mailed benefits,
The malingerer’s wrong, the waddling woman’s scorn,
The pangs of partially disabled, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That claimant’s merit of the unworthy fakes,
when they themselves might their
quietus make
With a bare petition? Who would bear this burden,
To grunt and sweat under this weary claim,
But the dread of being without benefits,
The undiscovered diagnosis from whose borne
No traveler returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear these claims we have
Than fly to work that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make claimants of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied over with a pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their termination turn awry,
And lose the name of all decisions.
Again, that is the question!
To settle or not to settle?
