For most people being close to a dead person is a hard thing to ask of them, even if they were family, because there is a weight that comes with death that can not be explained.
For one woman, Immaculate Auma, she had to do what most people would really struggle to.
Upon the death of her son, at Mbagathi Hospital, she was forced to carry the body of her child for about 5 kilometers to the City Mortuary as the facility officials claimed they could not help transport it.
Auma noted that after the son died while being attended to at Mbagathi Hospital, where he was being treated of pneumonia, the doctor instructed her to take her child to the mortuary.
She was also instructed to go to the police post at KNH to get a clearance letter to take the baby to any mortuary.
She had to walk the ‘longest’ journey with the weight of her dead six-month-old boy in her arms, on Wednesday, to a police post at Kenyatta National Hospital (KNH) where she was to file a notification.
If that was not so much for a grieving mother, she had to still walk with the lifeless body of her –once- active son to City Mortuary where the attendants kept her waiting for hours.
In the company of her mother, Linet Atieno, they sat on the bench at the mortuary for at least three hours, all the while holding on to the corpse, as they waited to be attended to.
“We came at around 10:30am and did not find anyone, so we sat on the bench,” Ms Atieno mentioned.
Read: Caroline Mwatha’s Case: Registry At City Mortuary Tempered With
Finally, Immaculate got help after intervention of human rights activists who were at the mortuary waiting for a postmortem to be carried out on the body of the late Caroline Mwatha whose body was found at the morgue.
“What if she was traumatized and got knocked by a vehicle while walking to this place?” posed one activist.
It was after the intervention that an attendant offered her help and took the body of her son.
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