DAILY POST
At the mention of the word, mortuary, many grow goose pimples all over. It evokes an aura of awe. Nobody visits the mortuary with a smiling face. It is either the visitor has tears already flowing, is at the verge of relapsing into the paroxysm of tears, or is in a pensive, remorseful, and apprehensive mood.
Mortuary is akin to a mini burial ground. Really, it is a temporary place for the dead before their final journey to the burial ground where they are committed to mother earth. It is a place where the spiritual and physical forces interact on an esoteric plane.
Expectedly, every mortuary unit at every hospital wears a tell-tale sign. The environment always wears a very quiet, mournful, awful and cold look. The atmosphere emits dirge, a quick reminder of the ineluctability of death for every mortal and the vanity of all earthly struggles and possessions.
For a critical observer, a visit to any mortuary will reveal four categories of people seen within the enclave apart from the dead. The first sets of people are those that are there to deposit dead bodies. There are also those who have gone there to claim the already deposited bodies for burial. Yet, there are others who just go there to experience what happens at the mortuary, and then, the last group of people are the workers- the mortuary attendants.
However, the outlook at the Isolo General Hospital Mortuary in Lagos is not different.
DAILY POST reporter who was there last week experienced firsthand the awful, horrible and educative events as they unfolded.
As soon as you get into the General Hospital, you would see a sign post with an arrow directing you to the mortuary unit on the right hand side. It is a modest bungalow though with a rough, rusted roofing sheet beside the three-storey Mother and Child Centre.
Just as you take a turn on your right, your nostrils would inform you that the land of the dead is close-by. The putrefying odour within the vicinity would invade your olfactory lobes, an indication that you are correctly following the directional sign. The question you would ask yourself immediately is: Why the stinking odour? But, determined to get to the mortuary unit, our Correspondent defied the malodorous smell and descended to a point where he joined other people, who ostensibly were there for the body of their sister lying cold in the mortuary.
From that vantage position, our correspondent monitored events of the day. After observing what was happening from afar, he braved all odds and went beyond that point, moving straight into the mortuary where the embalmed corpses were arranged in rows waiting to be claimed. On getting to the point, the attendants wearing boots and hand gloves accosted our reporter, who quickly told them that he was searching for one of his friends who had been missing for over two weeks.
With that excuse, he was promptly led into the section where all the corpses deposited in the last two weeks were kept. After examining the corpses, our reporter pretended not to have seen his friend, but had seen life in its naked form. Inside the room were dead bodies in various forms, placed on wooden planks and lined up on the floor, waiting to be claimed and evacuated for burial.
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