By YEMISI OLUSINA
To most people, the world of the living is different from that of the dead. This explains why many won’t dare getting close to a corpse no matter how closely related they were to dead person. But some set of people have a different view. These are mortuary attendants who make their earning from catering for the dead. A mortuary attendant, Ruphus Idache shares his experience with The Nigerian Xpress about his times in the midst of the dead.
When Ruphus Idache (not real name because he still wants to keep his job) was coming to Lagos some eight years ago, his dream was to get a lucrative job, one that he would be proud of, in one of the many high brow companies located all over the city. With high hopes of a better life outside their home in Kogi State, his family of three especially, bade him farewell to the city.
Just as the popular saying, “man proposes but God disposes” goes, getting a reliable job became a hardous task for him. For about five months of his stay in Lagos, he was unable to secure a stable job. He would roam around the city from Ajegunle in the Ajeromi Local Government Area where he stayed with one of his kinsmen, to everywhere and nowhere in particular searching for any job. “I had only my secondary certificate, so, I was prepared to do any job. I was not looking for a big office work but at least something regular in any office,” he told Nigerian Xpress.
He was about making up his mind to retrace his steps back to the village when another man from his state told him he had got an offer for him. His joy, therefore, knew no bounds because his family members were “My wife could not understand why it took me so much to get a job and started sending money home. You know the general belief is that Lagos is a city of money, just try and come and you will have a better life. I also came with the same belief but when I got here, I discovered that it is simply more than imagined,” he said.
He was so overwhelmed with the excitement that day that he could neither sleep nor eat until the day of interview. But his joy was soon short-lived when on the day he was to resume work, he was asked after being interviewed at the General Hospital to go to the mortuary section of the hospital and get familiarized with the environment he would be working. “At first, my heart skipped and I thought I did not hear the officer right.
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But well, I just thought since it was a hospital, my office might be situated close to the mortuary and what is there after all, we all pass around such places all of the time at some point. I braced up to follow the old man that was to take me to my new office after all, I am a man and should not now develop any cold feet when this was just an answer to the prayers I had been saying for many months,” he said, looking very far away as if he was trying to capture every moment of that day.
Soon, they finally got to their destination, the destination he never wished for. Relating how he felt, Ruphus said: “when we did not branch at the last building to the mortuary and we proceeded instead towards the building labeled, mortuary, I had a feeling that I was no longer the one walking but I kept moving, whatever the force that was pushing me, I could not say up till today.“
As he said, he actually kept on moving and never missed a step until the man leading him stopped, opened a room and beckoned on him to enter. That actually did it. If Ruphus’ heart had skipped earlier, his next experience was unimaginable. “The man finally stopped by the main entrance of this house and asked me to enter. Obviously, I was standing rooted to a point so, he had to hit me on the chest.’
This is where you will be working’, he announced. Although his voice sounded very far away, I knew that he was quite close to me. When I set my eyes on the so-called people I would be attending to, I thought it was all a bad dream. Lying all over the place were lifeless bodies of men and women, some still fresh, others not, some with blood all over them, others, children with all kinds of expressions on their faces depicting the kind of death that snuffed life out of them.
I simply could not but passed out. In all my 35 years, then, I had never seen more than a dead person lying in state before and now to have been surrounded by many dead bodies, it was like a horror movie. For some minutes, I was frozen to the spot and could neither move nor talk until someone hit me again and shook me all over before I could gain my consciousness,” recalled Ruphus.
As if the sight of the bodies on the floor was not enough, when Ruphus finally became totally conscious, his superior, obviously used to the environment, saw no big deal in the way Ruphus reacted. Generally called ‘Papa’ by everyone in the hospital, the man went on to intimate him about the dictates of the new job. His words to him, Ruphus told this newspaper were: “There are more bodies in the cabinets and your job is to take care of them as much as possible until their relatives come for them. He kept pushing the cabinets in and out for me to see what I was into.
They must be washed daily, the room must be well kept, there must not be any bad smell and you will be working on shifts. Before he could finish talking, I was already feeling sick and I honestly thought I was going to die soon too. I told him I was not feeling fine and he said he understood how I felt. He asked me to go and think about it that I had three days to make my decision, if after the three days they did not see me, he said they would assume that I was not interested in the job. I was very happy to be set free but throughout that day, I vomited at the slightest opportunity.”
Strangely, Papa’s words actually worked for the Kogi State-born man. “Although I would not know how I got home, I concluded that I was never going to go back there for any job. I had thought I was going to have a sleepless night that same day but I did not. I woke up the following day normally and went straight to accost the man who got me the job. I fought him, told him how disappointed I was and went on cursing and cursing him.
Surprisingly, he was not annoyed with me. He did not fight me back. Instead, he told me to be brave and go for the job as I am a man and I have to earn a living. By that time, my two children were out of school in the village and my wife was already unhappy that my coming to Lagos was causing her more problems than she had envisaged so, I should return home,” he told Nigerian Xpress.
Ruphus, of course, resumed work the following Monday and has since worked at two different mortuaries in Lagos till date. “I first worked at government hospital and I am currently with a private hospital in Agege area of the state,” he said.
Ever since, Ruphus has been catering for his wife and children with the income from the job, which he now sees as a noble profession. “Although the money is not much but it is enough to take care of my family. I am contented with what I do and I believe it is better than staying idle or being at the mercy of other people before I could feed and pick up my responsibilities,” he said.
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When asked whether his wife approved of the job, the father of three said he could not inform his wife about the kind of job he does for about two years. When he finally did, the woman almost left him but for the fact that he was able to care for her and the family. “If I could almost die at the initial point of this job, you can imagine how a woman would have felt about the job. I intentionally did not tell her about the details of my job, I only told her that I worked in the hospital.
I insisted that she stays back at home so that we could save some money. I told her that the cost of living here in Lagos is too high and we needed to achieve some things before our children grew up to enter the secondary school. So, she stayed back, got a plot of land and was always supervising the building. I only go home occasionally whenever I am off-duty to check how far the work had gone.
We had roofed the house, fixed the windows and doors before I finally told her what I do in Lagos. That night, she could not sleep in the same room with me. Well, I did not bother, I only gave her time to ruminate about it and compare it with many of our people who lived on the same job outside the country. After a while, she took it in good faith as we live much better than others in the village,” he said.
Giving more details about the job, Ruphus said besides the first day that he was terrified due to the number of the corpses all over the place; he sees the job as a duty to humanity. “Popularly, most people see the dead as spirit beings so as soon as their relative or family member dies, they cannot go near the body. But someone has to take care of the dead.
Besides, it is in the interest of the general public that we take care of them. If no one will venture to do this job, I wonder what the society will be like. One wonderful thing about the dead is that they are helpless, calm, and peaceful. It is where you put them that they will be. They are quiet. They need people to take care of them and that is what I am doing. At first, I was afraid but when I remembered that someone took care of our Lord Jesus Christ when He died, I saw this job as a rare assignment to humanity,” he enthused.
He encouraged the society to change their disposition towards the dead saying, it is a debt everyone owes humanity. He said, “Death is a debt owed by everyone, we will all die one day whether we like it or not. It is the time each person will die that no one knows. When we all die, we will not be able to think, move, see, hear, speak or do any of those things we do while alive again.
That is why I always advise that everyone should make it a point of duty to visit the mortuary time after time. This will help us to get closer to God, improve our thinking and ways of living because death will surely come one day. This is one good thing this job has done for me. It humbles me every day, especially when I see younger people, babies being brought here, fine girls, women who were once doing shakara all over the place. Once they bring them here, it is over. They are helpless; they do not know or care about whatever they do to their bodies any longer. It is really humbling,” he said.
Explaining what his job entails, the 45-year-old man said he has been assigned to different jobs in the mortuary. This ranged from washing of corpses, keeping watch over them at night to sanitizing the environment to guide against unpleasant odour around the mortuary and embalming corpses, a knowledge he later acquired, which is now fetching him money.
Reflecting on some generally myths surrounding the job, Ruphus said, dead bodies are harmless beings but just as living beings, they are stronger than each other. “What people don’t know is that these beings know that you are taking care of them so, they cannot do you any harm. As for those attendants who claimed they have been attacked by any of them, they must have done them one evil or the other,” he stated.
Debunking the assumption that corpses converse with themselves, Ruphus said “I do not know anything about that, although some of my colleagues said they do. I have never heard them discussing and I believe those who have must have done something spiritual to have been exposed to their world. I have slept there before, gone to check on them and I have never knocked the door before entering,” he asserted.
However, Ruphus said, just as some living are strong and choosy about their friends and associates, some corpses also do. His words: “There are times you will put a corpse beside an already placed one and it would resent it. They will not allow others to lie close to them. Somehow, you just find out that the new corpse placed around the old one is somewhere else the next day.”
On whether it is true that mortuary attendants speak to corpses before embalming them, Ruphus said it is a way of respecting them not as a ritual. “Whenever we speak to them, it is to let them know that we have a level of respect for them and the purpose of whatever we want to do is in their interest and not for evil, nothing, more. It is not as if we want to take permission from them or that they have resisted us,” he noted.
Expressing his displeasure on the way some families treat corpses of their relatives, Ruphus advised that it is bad to abandon bodies in mortuaries. “There are times. Many people dump bodies of their relatives here without looking back to cater for them least of all coming to take them away for burial, it is not good. The whole place is just congested. But there are many who do care for bodies of their loved ones for as many months they are here.
Such people are good people and will definitely be rewarded. I have dosed off one day and I heard a voice saying, ‘I want to go and rest, tell my people to be fast with the burial arrangement… I had to go and check the register to know which of them has stayed for so long since I did not know exactly whose voice I heard. We eventually encouraged families that we know to hurry up with the burial arrangements. That is why I am saying that it is not good to abandon corpses in the mortuary, they do not feel happy,” he said.