Andrew Njoroge; Living with the dead as a mortuary attendant for 40year

Mzee Andrew lived with the dead as a mortuary attendant at Nairobi’s MP Shah Hospital for 14,600 days until he recently retired. Many people believe death is scary others say it is punitive while some say it is downright despicable. But for Andrew aged 60years says working as a mortician was a fulfilling job though nobody desires to walk through piles of corpses every day.

Growing up on the slopes of Kihumbuini Murang’a County, Andrew never thought of even working in a hospital let alone in a morgue. While he was in Form Two, he was forced to drop out of school due to lack of fees. He started working at a local garage in Murang’a town as a mechanic.

“I would leave the house a very clean man but, in the evening, I would return very dirty because of the work at the garage this I did not like at all and so I quit,” he recalls.

He went looking for menial jobs and as luck would have it, he was called to fill in a vacancy as a casual worker at M.P. Shah Hospital.

“I worked as a casual laborer for one year and on July 11, 1981, I was officially employed and given a payroll number.”

Since then, he worked in different departments — in the X-ray room, kitchen and wards. When a patient died in the wards Andrew and his co-workers would help the nurses transfer them to the hospital mortuary.

After a while, a vacancy arose in the morgue following the retirement of one of the attendants. Andrew applied and got the job. Unlike at the wards where he would pack the bodies, he was taught everything about taking care of corpses once at the mortuary.

According to Andrew, when a corpse is brought in, they just don’t put them in the storage unit. They go through the embalming process. “Embalming a body is meant to slow down the decaying process when a body is brought in, we drain its fluid and this is done by introducing specialist embalming solutions into the body after someone has passed away, helping to give them a peaceful appearance,” he explained.

However, the embalmment is done only when there is a burial permit from the family members.

“You have to be very careful while handling the corpses, when you embalm the corpse, the post-mortem will not show anything even if there was poison in the body thus tempering with it. This might land you in the wrong hands of the law,” he says.

“Here you have to put yourself in the shoes of those grieving, when they come to check or pick the body, I have to be there for them. I will cry with them, pray with them and even view the body with them just to show them I am with them through this journey. Once they are ready to view the body, I give them enough time with their loved ones,” he further explained.

In the four decades he had been working there, the Westgate attack that left 67 people dead had a toil on his mental wellbeing. “Many of those people killed at Westgate were brought to us, the bodies were damaged with gun wounds and we had to reconstruct the damaged bodies before family members arrived at the mortuary quickly,” he said.

For the entire time he served at the mortuary, only one person came back to thank him for taking care of their loved one. “I remember the wife of Bishop Dr Wilfred Lai came to say thank-you,” he recalls.

Mzee says he has never experienced stigmatization because of his work as everyone around him knew what he was doing for a living.

“Neighbors appreciate what I do because I help them too while I am at home. In one instance, a neighbor died at home and every member of his family was afraid to take him to the mortuary. So, when the police were down with their report, I covered the body with a blanket, put it on my shoulder, put it in the police vehicle and took it to the City Mortuary,” he narrates.

On his personal experiences, Andrew says he has never seen a dead body walk, nor has he communicated with their ghosts.

“That is just a myth because before this body is brought into the morgue, a physician must confirm that it’s indeed dead. Secondly, the corpses are not moved immediately to the morgue. At M.P Shah, it was our practice to keep the body in the ward for over one and a half hours before transferring it to the mortuary. So, I have never encountered a ‘dead man’ walk. Also, there is a common belief that the spirit of a dead person remains active long after he has stopped breathing and could continue to move about even after the body has been certified dead. I have never encountered a dead man walk,” he clarifies.

He affirms: “At the morgue, nobody bothers you, you just work with the dead who will not question you that’s a peaceful place to work.”

Questioning him If he died today, would he like being handled the way he dealt with the many corpses that passed through his hands?

“Yes,” he says.

Article By Suzy Nyongesa.