Mortuary attendant says his wife must be drunk before making love with him

Obong John, a mortuary attendant at Iyi- Enu General Hospital, has lamented how mortuary attendants suffer from marriage rejections, break-up in romantic and societal rejection for choosing the profession that brings them into contact with corpses on daily basis.

According to him, “I lost relationships because of my profession. I lost two fiancées because I told them the truth about what I do for a living. No woman will be pleased to marry a man like me except she is not with her right senses,” he said in an interview with Sunday Telegraph.

Speaking of the stigma mortuary attendants and by extension, trained pathologists, face in Nigeria, the 42-year-old he could not get married to his choice lady for many years when his mates where getting married despite being financially stable.

He said: “I took my wife unawares and by the time she knew it, it was too late for her to go back; she was already pregnant of my twin boys but it wasn’t easy convincing her to stay. I thought I had lost her as usual.

“This was what I suffered for years before I decided not to tell my wife what I do until I impregnated her. It is a major problem for us. Nobody in the society wants to relate with us even the few ones that do, will not want to eat with us on the same plate.

“My wife does not eat swallow with me on the same plate because of my job. Touching her is yet another problem. It’s painful but there is nothing I can do. Some people will not want to sit near us. They feel that we are corpses too. Those that will sit with you will hold their breath as if we smell. In fact, this is the reason we hardly tell people what we do except they discover it themselves.

“Initially, for my wife to make love to me, she has to be drunk in order not to think about it or feel that she was making love to a corpse or being touched with the same hands with which I dress dead bodies. But she is getting better now but I know she is not free from her feelings yet.”