A former morgue attendant shares his experiences
By LYNNISSHA RUNA
Talk about attending to and giving care to dead human bodies, Simone Palmer knows a little about them.
Hailed from east Kwaio in the Malaita Province, the 57-year -old Palmer has been working as a morgue attendant for the past 10 years.
His experience over these years has made him an “expert” in dealing with dead human bodies.
Dealing with dead bodies is not for the faint hearted or the easily frightened, especially when the body in subject is neither a close nor a biological relative.
We turn to associate the dead with the devil itself and hence stir up the feeling of fear that humans possess via our biological make up to take the better of us.
Palmer first entered the health fraternity in November of 2002 to look after the mentally ill.
On the 15th of November 2009, he was accepted for the position of mortuary attendant after a vacancy existed at the mortuary department of the National Referral Hospital
He said that after he was accepted, he got in and started working with the late David Maelaua.
“Malaua was the morgue attendant at the National Referral Hospital caring for hundreds of dead bodies during his time,” Palmer says.
“As for me,” Palmer continues, “I worked as a morgue attendant for eight years and became a supervisor in 2014 and decided to quit employment in 2016.
In retrospect, the work has its challenges.
“The generally held relationship between the dead and the devil is the first challenge that one must set-aside to do such work,” Palmer iterates.
“It is difficult to brush aside such a normal human feeling of fear,” he softly articulates.
Palmer says that he gained strength from the fact that he wanted to prove to his critics that the morgue, let alone becoming an attendant, is after all not what our minds coined it to be.
However, Palmer confessed that it is normal for humans to harbour fear.
He continues to say that cleaning a dead human body for the first time, for the first days, weeks and months takes time to adjust to and to have complete control over fear we have within.
“I find it really difficult to have control over my own feelings of fear at first because I often imagine that the dead bodies are watching me,” he recounts.
He says that as he continued to attend to dead bodies over time, his confidence grew and the morgue became just another place of work for him.
The former morgue attendant said that he loved his job because he felt that he was doing his bit for the country he loved.
Palmer believes that he is clandestinely blessed by the spirits of the dead people he handled during his time.
He recalled an incident o on 12 September 2013 where a car he was in rolled over the FFA hilltop.
“I escape unscathed and I am very much indebted to the many dead bodies I washed and cleaned over the years for standing with me in my hour of need,” Palmer says with vehement conviction.
He urged the Government to address the mortuary services including better refrigeration and air conditioning systems.
He further recommends that responsible authorities quickly build a bigger and better mortuary unit so that the dead can be attended to in a more acceptable and respectable manner possible.
