“RANDOM 21. I went to the mortuary at the age of seventeen. There was a death in the family. The mortuary is one of the tourism sites recommended in scriptures: “The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.”

The first thing that strikes you about a mortuary is the grey coldness of death. A mortuary is essentially a deep freezer set to frigid temperature. The other thing is the stale smell of death. It hung stubbornly in the air like a glory cloud.

You see, despite the valiant effort of that deep freezer, the dead continued to die, hence the smell of rotting cadavers. This echoes God’s warning to Adam: “In dying you shall die.” Jesus begged the Father not to allow his holy one to see putrescence. In dying he did not die.

I stood among the dead, contemplating life. A mortuary attendant dived right into a meal. He and the dead were used to each other. They couldn’t smell his food any more than he could smell their putrefaction. There was an olfactory truce.

And then a drawer was pulled. It contained babies, frozen babies piled on top of each other. One stared at me. Hers must have been sudden death. Her hands were still outstretched, wanting to be carried. I saw ten, maybe twenty babies in that drawer. They were discarded like torn dolls in a house of horror. Wrong drawer.

The right drawer was pulled and I saw my family member sharing a cubicle with a total stranger. And that’s the nature of death. There’s undue familiarity. They were both naked and they were not ashamed.

I have been to the house of mourning and I learned two lessons:

1. In dying you shall die.

2. You don’t take anything out of this world. Not even your body.”

-Leke Alder