Our society is such that has little or no value for human beings when they are alive how much more when they are dead.
Human beings are the most important of all God’s creations and should be treated with respect and dignity.
Such treatment should not be given to people only when they are alive but should also be extended to them in the time of death, that is the reason last respects are given to the dead.
Losing a loved one is very painful. It is emotionally-draining and the person who is bereaved while battling with grief has a variety of responsibilities to attend to in order to get his or her dead loved one to their final resting place.
Part of giving that last respects to the dead comes into play when a dead person is taken to the mortuary, depending on the person’s last wish and religious beliefs.
Mortuary services are not for the faint-hearted and should not be undertaken by persons who are money-mongers but should be carried out by people who first and foremost have passion for taking proper care of dead bodies before they are taken to their final resting place.
Several mortuaries in our society are better sealed off because of the level of negligence the owners or handlers mete out on dead bodies.
Mortuary neglect according to Wikipedia can comprise of many things, such as bodies being stolen from the morgue, or bodies being mixed up and the wrong one buried.
Mortuary neglect also includes improper embalming of bodies, improper storing of bodies, unlawful harvesting of human organs, overcharging for services and so on.
When a mortuary or funeral home fails to preserve a body properly, it could make the whole losing of a loved one more painful.
It can also expose morticians as well as visitors to health hazards.
There is need to have a funeral service commission or a regulatory agency at the federal, state and local levels in Nigeria. The funeral service commission will be designed to protect the public from unlawful practices in mortuaries and death care industry.
The regulatory agency will set high standards for the professional and ethical conduct of funeral homes, mortuary supervisors, morticians and even public cemeteries. The agency will equally be responsible for regular monitoring of mortuary homes in its jurisdiction to curtail unlawful practices.
There is also a need for issuance of license to those who want to run mortuary services before they begin. Mortuary service should not be an all-comers-affair. In some mortuaries, there are corpses that have stayed for several years either because the owners have not come to claim them or because of legal issues.
Government should enact a legislation to limit the time a dead body stays in the morgue and if such time elapses, the corpse will be disposed by the government. This will help reduce the workload on morticians and the health hazards to them as well. Morticians also need to be well paid to motivate them to give their best to the work.
In addition to that, religious and cultural bodies should endeavour to cut down drastically on cost of burial. A lot of abandoned corpses in morgues are there because bereaved families lack the funds to carter for burial expenses. Expensive or low cost burial does not determine where the dead person will spend eternity but such person’s relationship with God in his or her lifetime.
These recommendations will aid in reducing funeral home negligence to the barest level.
Written by QUEEN ANIGBOGU
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