About Us	Search	Advertising

	Brought to you by:

BODIES lie on tables, cut down the middle, with their insides in buckets wedged between their legs.

Some have had their brains removed and neat wedges of skull lie next to them on the guerneys. Everything is red, white and silver and even the tiled walls reflect the tint. Mortuary workers with saws and wooden blocks hover above the corpses, intent on discovering what has brought them here.

It is not my first time in a mortuary, and there can be no doubt that it isn't my last. My legs are weak, nonetheless, when I step into the autopsy and dissection rooms of the Salt River medico-legal facility in Durham Road.

Actually, it isn't my first time at that particular mortuary but, I am ashamed to say, I never summoned up the courage to enter the death zone on that occasion, even though I was there for close on four hours.

It was a dark, stormy night and the smell of decomposing flesh was overwhelming, even from the outside. There were only three people on the night shift and, although they seemed pleased to have company, I admit I was terrified. I fled.

My apologies to Ron Ackerberg, who had painstakingly explained the workings of the mortuary to me and was prepared to take me to crime scenes, should there have been any that night, all so that I might describe here the sensitive issue of collecting the dead.

The Salt River mortuary is not a morgue where those who have died peacefully are readied for their funerals. It is a state health facility where the victims of murder, car accidents and suicide are brought to be cut open and examined in minute detail. It is not a peaceful place, despite being deathly quiet.

When I finally work up the guts to enter the autopsy rooms on a Wednesday morning the following week, I am shaken to the core, even though I know exactly what I will see.

To be in the presence of death is seldom easy, but to be surrounded by the remains of people plucked from their lives unexpectedly and often gruesomely, is company few can be comfortable in.

The scent of the dead is more than overpowering. The cloying, swee?tish air is more difficult to stomach than the sight that greets me: 16 bodies in various stages of dissection. I am told the smell does not emanate so much from these corpses as from the ones that line the locked fridges and the clothes they were wearing at the time of their deaths, but it is hard to dissociate the visual from the olfactory in a mortuary.

Shortly after going in, the mana?ger of the autopsy area, and my guide, chief forensic officer John Retief, is called away to attend to the distraught family of a young man whose body is being unloaded from the mortuary van at the back. He had been hijacked and shot just hours before and he is taken out of the body bag before my eyes. I can see his disbelie?ving parents waiting to identify him on the other side of the one-way glass of the "viewing room". The experience is spine-chilling.

I wander among the corpses with my ca?mera. All but five of the photos I took are unprintable, in this newspaper or any other. The autopsy procedure, which involves a "Y-cut" and a "skull-cap" in which internal organs and brains are removed from the victim, weighed and inspected, seems unnecessarily invasive, but the law decrees this be done in cases where unnatural death is suspected.

For example, the body of a man who had clearly died as a result of 27 gunshots still needs to be sawed open for examination. I ask the person performing the autopsy what he is looking for when the cause of death is patently clear. I am surprised to discover the man has no medical training at all, and is merely carrying out standard procedure. His work, he tells me, will later be inspected by doctors and then he will simply "put everything back" and stitch the body up.

The mortuary is housed in an old building and its design does not lend itself well to its purpose. Doorways and passages lead off at odd angles and the drainage system leaves much to be desired. I doubt one could ever be at ease turning a corner, not knowing what to expect until it is but a metre away. When I enter a second dissection area I am confronted by a sight I will never forget.

A gangster lies before me, his torso split open, his skull empty. His brain is in a bucket of formalin on the floor and his intestines are in his lap. A woman is drawing silver soup-ladles of blood from his chest cavity and pouring them into a measuring jug.

On his arm is this tattoo: "The wind shall blow over my dead body, but cruel shall I be. So if the Devil don't want me, the 26 Hell shall take me." Indeed.

I look at several of the other bodies and inside one of the storage fridges ? the "fresh" one where the bodies are less than a week old ? but the memory is a blur. I have seen enough. Mercifully, John reappears and we step out into what seems now to be beautifully fresh air.

Yes, he tells me, many of the workers have no medical training. It is a problem. No, they do not "just deal with it". But even though counselling is available ? a debriefing of sorts ? not many make use of it. There is a kind of macho attitude, even among the women workers, and they do not like to admit that their job scars them.

I say their occupation would drive a person to drink. It does, he tells me. He himself makes use of the counselling and is a teetotaller, but that has come with close on two decades in the industry. He agrees that he experiences death differently to those who do not face it every day.

"One becomes detached from the deaths, and even the lives, of those around you. It is a necessary coping mechanism without which one could not do this job."

3 085 dead passed through the Salt River mortuary last year, equating to an average of nearly 60 a week.

Weekends at the end of the month are busier. Sometimes the overflow must be sent to another mortuary, like the one at the Tygerberg Hospital. The computer system is necessarily intricate, but reminds one of nothing so much as a market, where each stage of the process is recorded and filed for statistical and legal purposes.

"The state mortuaries are themselves in a process of change. The business of dying was last year handed over from the police to the health department and a period of adjustment is to be expected, says Mark Myburgh, another chief forensic officer.

Although I am desperate to leave the house of the dead, I stay another hour chatting to Mark and his assistant director Wayne Mittens. Both have worked at Salt River since the mid 80's and remember well the dispensation under the police, as well as under the apartheid regime.

They tell of a time when police brutality was the norm, but being an English-speaking policeman was frowned upon. Mittens explains how they were stationed at the police mortuaries as "punishment" for being "red-necks", despite being "100% South African", and that is why they are there today.

Like John, they say that daily exposure to death has immunised them to it to a degree and that dying is merely a stage in life, no matter how it comes about. Both say they would be comfortable, in the event of their own deaths, to be autopsied at a state mortuary, despite the horror that meets the eye.

Mark relates an incident in 2006 when a man committed suicide in the mortuary toilets. Surprisingly, to my mind, he says certain staff members who joined up months after the suicide have steadfastly refused to enter those toilets.

"I believe there are people who can feel the spirit of the dead and can sense where a disturbing death took place. I do not have this ability myself, but I have no doubt there are people who do."

It is surely hard not to sense death at the mortuary. I certainly cannot forget it. When I get home I put my clothes, permeated with the scent of the dead, into the hot-water cycle of the washing machine and then soak myself in the bath for an hour. I doubt I shall be setting foot in a mortuary again. Not in this lifetime, anyway.

	Back to top
©