Alone in death: Help us bury our loved one
Mr Josphat Kioko Mwangangi and Inset photo of his late sister Agnes Mwangangi.
What you need to know:
Editor’s note: This is a follow-up of the story of Agnes Mwangangi whose body was among hundreds listed by the Nairobi City Council as unclaimed. The body had been lying at Mama Lucy Kibaki Hospital Mortuary for several months. Read the first instalment here.
The family of Agnes Mwangangi, whose lifeless body was marked as unclaimed and was set for disposal, is seeking financial assistance to bury her.
A bill of Sh131,700 is standing between them and honouring her wish of “resting beside her parents when her time comes”.
Ms Mwangangi's body was among the 292 marked as unclaimed by the Nairobi City County She was admitted and had been lying at Mama Lucy Kibaki Hospital Mortuary since September 5, 2022.
The family had lost touch with Agnes. They did not even know that their kin was lying at the facility. Her fate is shared with several others that she shared a common cold room with. Unclaimed, yet identified. In a previous interview, her brother Josphat Mwangangi, a cobbler, said he did not know that his sister’s body lay unclaimed at City Mortuary. This is backed by the rest of the family.
“We never knew Agnes had passed. It’s the Nation team that informed us about her passing. We went to the mortuary and confirmed that she was indeed the one lying there. At first, we thought that it was a lie until we saw her lifeless,” narrated Caroline Tausi, Agnes’ niece.
Around February last year, Agnes was involved in a road accident in Nairobi and sustained severe injuries to her spinal cord. She opted to be treated closer home, at Matuu Level 4 hospital, under the care of her brother.
But when she felt better, she left home for Nairobi to accomplish two missions: lodge a lawsuit against the driver of the vehicle that maimed her, and seek specialised health care. She hoped that someday, she would walk back home in good health, but that was not to be.
When they last spoke, she was in pain, the brother said. Her airtime ran out and he never heard from her again.
While there are no official statistics on how many unclaimed bodies are buried across Kenya, a Nation investigation that involved obtaining records as captured by the registrar of persons showed that many ended up unclaimed since their kin do not know of their demise. This was the case for Ms Mwangangi's family.
Now, the reality of Agnes’ death has sunk in. Financially. Emotionally. Psychologically.
Tortuous journey
Agnes’ hailed from a middle-class family but the deaths of their parents made their situation at home bad. Their parents were the fabric that held their family together. When they died, the family disintegrated. She had hoped to weave back their family’s unity.
The irony is that it is her death that has brought her family back together, but even so, the emotional toll her demise has on them is “so immense,” Tausi said.
From learning about the death from the media to now struggling to foot the expenses, Tausi says it has been an emotionally tortuous journey.
The family had hoped to foot the bill and have the body from the mortuary on March 11. But “as things stand, it is a race against time to raise the mortuary fees among other burial expenses but we can hardly raise enough,” Tausi says.
She says they have tried their best to raise funds for all the expenses in vain.
“We are scared that the bill will continue accumulating. We have not had peace since we found her at the mortuary. We have tried knocking on different doors,” she adds.
The family had set a tentative burial date. But now, they say, they are likely to miss the target because of financial constraints.
“We are pleading with anyone who is willing to help so that we can bury my aunt. We just want her to rest well. The Paybill number is 4108803 Account No 0700736365,” she told the Nation yesterday, adding that the funds will be used to settle the hospital bill, buy her a coffin and cater for other burial expenses.
