I work in a mortuary – these are the VERY inappropriate requests I've had to turn down from grieving relatives | The Sun
DEALING with death is hard enough, but what about when it is your day job?
Mum-of-four Kate Marshall works in a mortuary at an NHS hospital in North-West England, and part of her role is to let people see the bodies of their deceased relatives.
Now Kate, 50, has revealed in a new book the incredible secrets of what the living get up to when confronted with the death of a loved one.
Here, in an adapted extract from Sorry for Your Loss, she details the extraordinary – and very unusual – requests she has had over the years.
KERRY, who died in a fall downstairs, was in her 40s absolutely covered in tattoos and had clearly been a fan of piercings.
Her partner, Brian, turned up at the mortuary without an appointment and asked about the piercings.
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He wanted them all left in her, except one which was in a ‘private place’.
If nurses don’t take jewellery off when a patient dies, then a lot of families are swift to come to us and collect them.
I swear some of them get there so they can head for Cash Converters straight after.
One woman turned up with a pot of Vaseline because she wanted the rings off her mum before her sister got there.
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Brian wasn’t waiting, either. He wanted me to go in and get that piercing now and hand it to him immediately.
I was not going to disrespect Kerry by looking there.
He didn’t look happy. Then he shoved a bag for life on the desk and said: “Can you dress her in that then?”
Inside was a black playsuit, a mask, cat ears and fishnet tights.
If someone wants to bring in an outfit as it makes them feel better knowing their mum is in her favourite blouse or whatever, we’ll do that.
But this? No.
With a death stare, he grabbed the carrier bag and left. We never saw him again.
Stuffed cats and cigarettes
While some relatives want us to take things out, others want us to put things in with their loved ones.
It is usually items like photographs, teddies or letters, but there have been a few stranger ones.
A stuffed cat – as in taxidermy, not Bagpuss – a rare comic we were told was worth £2,000, a Noddy egg cup, some cake and a crash helmet come to mind.
I think every mortuary in the country has been asked if the deceased can have a cigarette between their fingers when they go for cremation or burial.
People often ask to bring dogs to the mortuary. Always dogs, never any other animal.
They tend to just leave them in the office while they view their loved ones.
When Hetty turned up to see her late husband, Mick, she had at least eight dogs in the back of a Range Rover.
I could not allow that many dogs into the office.
“The office?” she said, “I want them to come into the viewing area and see their Daddy – say goodbye for one last time.”
I couldn’t allow that. It would be a breach of pretty much every regulation.
Hetty said: “What do you expect me to do? My dogs are sensitive – simply telling them that Daddy has died won’t make them understand.
“They need to smell him, they need to lick him. They need to see it for themselves.”
When I told her that could not happen she slammed the car door and stomped off to the mortuary.
I swear she was in there five minutes or less. She left, snorting: “Appalling!” and disappeared.
My job was put people at ease, help them through a trying time and to offer support when they came to see the body of a loved one.
But many who come to the mortuary now want to take pictures of the body – which is not allowed.
No selfies allowed? What about FaceTime?
One man told me: “Where’s the harm? She’s dead – she doesn’t know and she wouldn’t mind anyway.”
I repeated: “I’m really sorry, but it’s against our rules.”
He thought about it for a minute and then said: “FaceTime? That’ll be OK, won’t it? Just let her grandkids have a look.”
One family of 12 who turned up were adamant that dozens of other relatives wanted to see the poor woman.
They agreed to stick to the rules but, when I left to answer the phone, I got back to see them all with their phones out, snapping away, some of them posing at the side of her.
It bewilders me why anyone would want to do that, but maybe it’s a sign of the times.
The reason photography is not allowed is because it not appropriate and we need to protect the dignity and respect of the dead person who cannot consent.
I was often told: “But the family wants to see what he looks like now, whether he looks different.”
He looked dead, that’s how he looked!
We had a phone call about a 51-year-old man who had suffered a sudden cardiac arrest but was dead on arrival at A&E.
The day after, a woman called Maria arrived and said she was his wife. The paperwork named her as next of kin.
I watched as she gently stroked the dead man’s arm and said: “I’m so sorry, Joe. I’ll bring Amy up as best I can.”
As she left the viewing room, she told me their daughter was just six.
Maria got upset and said: “I don’t know how she’ll cope without her Daddy.”
The next day, I got a call from the Coroner’s Office. Joe’s wife wanted a viewing.
The other woman… and a secret lovechild
It turned out that Maria was not his wife, nor his legal next of kin.
She was someone he had been having an affair with while his real wife went through years of fertility treatment to have their two-year-old.
Not only would she have to be told that her husband had betrayed her for many years, she would also find out that he had another child.
A police officer had the harrowing task of telling her. Despite everything she still wanted to come and see Joe.
I felt so sorry for the real wife, Rachel, when she came in.
She was a tiny, completely broken woman. I took her in to see him and asked if she would like me to stay.
Without a word, she walked over to her husband, stared at him for the longest time – then just started punching and punching.
She was so hurt and why wouldn’t she be? Her life had been a web of lies for years and she was denied the chance to ask the questions which must have been swarming in her head.
She wept: “I only came to hit him. I bet you think I’m disgusting.”
I definitely didn’t. We never know how those stories end but Rachel would never get closure.
What my job really means
As a bereavement officer in a ‘storing’ mortuary it is my job to meet the family outside the viewing room.
If the body is under the care of the coroner, visits need to be supervised – otherwise visitors can be left alone.
The majority of viewings last about 30 minutes to an hour, but some hardly stay at all while others stayed much longer.
Despite people knowing their loved one has been in a fridge before the viewing, they can still be utterly shocked how cold the body is.
There are questions which came up time and again:
Will they be cold?
Will they be lonely?
Is it dark in the mortuary at night?
A lot of misunderstandings come from TV programmes:
Do you glue their eyes shut?
Do you sew their mouths closed?
Do you do their hair and make-up?
Do they sit up?
The answer is ‘no’ to all of that. Funeral directors do most of that. Nor is there a secret room where every single body is laid out on marble slabs.
Anything electrical has to be removed from a body as it will explode during cremation, which includes pacemakers.
When one old woman came in, I was amazed that to find she was 108.
I called her family and the man on the end of the phone, who was her grandson, kept wailing: “She was taken too soon!”
He must have passed me to four or five other men who all said the same thing.
They were so shocked and I was shocked at how shocked they were. I’d had less dramatic responses to suicides or children dying.
A mother's love
Mary was in her 50s and had conceived Abigail through donor insemination.
This was her last chance at motherhood but it was discovered her baby had Down's Syndrome and if Mary had gone to full term Abigail may have had a low quality of life and not lived long.
After a lengthy induced labour, she had given birth to Abigail in the early hours of the morning.
Later, Mary arrived at the mortuary with a collection of Winnie the Pooh books and told me: “I’m going to come and read to her every day. I won’t let her go until I’ve finished.”
And she kept to her word, coming in when there was no one there, usually two or three times a day.
Some nights we stayed until 7pm. We even opened up at the weekend and we were happy to give her all the time she needed.
It felt so natural – but the clock was ticking.
The baby was deteriorating. She was being moved between competing temperatures many times a day and had started to become grey.
Her once-beautiful skin was shrivelling, although Mary seemed to be in denial about that.
To start with, it had been easy to pretend that this was a “normal” set up. But it was now becoming increasingly difficult.
She finally had to agree that Abigail would have to move to the funeral directors and the service needed to be arranged.
That Friday morning before she was taken away, Mary was waiting with her book at 9am. She hadn’t finished it – and she never would.
The sight of that lovely woman and the baby she adored will stay with me forever. I could feel the bond between them, even though Abigail was no longer there.
Mary was a woman who had so much love to give, but no one to give it to now.
No way of grieving is right or wrong – but with each loss, I feel that we should take a moment to linger, to sit in that loss and ask ‘what now?’
It’s a time to reflect on whether our own life is at a crossroads, whether the lost one was someone dear, or just an acquaintance.
It gives us a chance to pause and wonder how our next moments, days, months and years will be lived, because no one knows when it will be their moment to leave.
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Adapted from Sorry For Your Loss: What Working With The Dead Taught Me About Life, by Kate Marshall with Linda Watson Brown, published by Mardle Books, price £8.99. Out on July 21.
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