Listen to Samuel Kolawole read this excerpt.

Folahan worked mainly night shifts at the morgue, down in the basement. That was the only way he could work without drawing attention, and the arrangement worked for Bill. A family could bring their dead one day, and the corpse would be prepared for burial the following morning. It took about forty minutes to prepare a corpse plus the time required for embalmment. Folahan only assisted in the embalmment process if needed. 

Folahan would open the body bag slowly from the head down, armed with a disinfectant spray. Then he would transfer the deceased to a stainless-steel slab with slats for the water to run through. The head reveals the fact of death—vacant eyes, gaping mouth, the vomit-inducing smell that rises out of orifices. Sometimes fluid gushed out of the ears and nose. Folahan’s first time opening a body bag sent him heaving into the toilet of the prep room, but he got used to it. Thinking helped him work and gave him fortitude. He thought about his family. Junior, a pre-adolescent, was growing tall when he left. He wondered how tall he was now. He remembered his children’s smiles, longing tears, and questions about when he would bring them to America when he was about to leave. 

He sometimes imagined following the traditional trade of mghassilchi, something he had read somewhere months ago. Mghassilchi washed and shrouded the bodies of the dead for religious burial. It was an honorable profession, he learned, and God bountifully rewarded those who did it. He imagined purifying the body for burial after the soul rose to the sky, leaving the shell on earth, back to the dust from whence it came.

Folahan sometimes imagined Bill as a mghassilchi too. Bill insisted on showing respect to the bodies no matter their condition. They lost their lives; they shouldn’t lose their dignity, he would say. Bill provided cloth to cover their private parts and taught Folahan how to wash them gently with warm water splashing out of a long hose hanging from a single faucet. Folahan learned to sponge them with soap from head to toe and towel them off without chipping their delicate skin. He learned to close their eyes and mouth, positioning them with their hands crossed over the abdomen, as in a casket. He learned to wash the hair. To oil and comb it. If the corpse needed to be embalmed, the body was wheeled to another room, where Bill got to work under the glare of UV lights. Folahan hardly participated in that process, which involved making a small incision in the neck to allow the blood to drain, injecting embalming solution into the carotid artery through a small tube connected to a machine. He waited on Bill, handing him tools and helping him hold them. Bill injected a solution to plump facial features if the body was emaciated. If trauma or disease had altered the appearance of the deceased, he enhanced it using wax, adhesive, and plaster. He took proper care, like a sculptor remodeling a stone or an artist touching up a painting. In the end the deceased could be viewed in the casket, dressed, cosmetics applied. The body would be beautiful again . . .