I Visited My Wife In Mortuary For 6 Months Praying God Should Bring Her Back
By
Festus Otasowie
For six months, she remained unburied.
One day, I went to the mortuary to pray.
It took six months before I buried Vivian.
Six months.
There were circumstances surrounding that delay that I don’t need to revisit here.
But there is something about those six months that I have rarely spoken about.
The mortuary where Vivian lay was between my home and the office where I worked in Lagos.
Which meant that almost every weekday, I drove past it in the morning on my way to work.
And I drove past it again on my way home.
Twice a day.
Life outside kept moving.
People went to work.
Traffic moved.
Offices opened.
Phones rang.
People complained about ordinary things.
And somewhere along my route, behind those walls, was my wife.
I knew she was there.
Day after day.
Week after week.
Month after month.
There is something strange about knowing that someone you love is gone while still knowing exactly where their body is.
Perhaps part of me understood what had happened.
But another part of me was still fighting it.
I prayed.
And prayed.
And prayed.
Then one day, I did something I have hardly ever spoken about.
I took some of Vivian’s clothes.
And I went to the mortuary.
I went there to pray for my wife to rise from the dead.
Yes.
I actually did that.
Twenty-five years later, I could try to make that moment sound more reasonable.
I won’t.
Because that would be unfair to the man who walked into that mortuary.
He wasn’t standing twenty-five years away from the event, looking backwards with perspective.
He was inside it.
His wife had died.
His newborn daughter was alive.
The burial had not happened.
Life was continuing around him.
And somewhere inside all of that, he still wanted God to change the ending.
I believed in God.
I believed the Bible.
I knew the stories.
Lazarus came out of a tomb.
Jairus got his daughter back.
Death had not always been the final sentence in the stories I had spent my Christian life believing.
So I prayed.
Not a philosophical prayer.
Not a carefully worded prayer.
I wanted my wife back.
She did not get up.
And eventually, I had to leave the mortuary without her.
There is no dramatic theological conclusion coming after that sentence.
Twenty-five years later, I still believe in God.
I still believe in prayer.
I still believe that God is able to do what human beings cannot do.
But faith did not mean I got the answer I desperately wanted that day.
And perhaps maturity has allowed me to stop pretending that every difficult experience with God must eventually fit inside a beautiful explanation.
Some prayers leave us with answers.
Some leave us with questions.
And some leave us having to discover how to continue living after the answer we wanted never came.
I think differently now about the man who went to that mortuary.
I don’t laugh at him.
I don’t feel embarrassed by him.
And I don’t need to turn what he did into evidence of extraordinary faith either.
I understand him.
He loved his wife.
He was hurting.
And he wasn’t ready to let her go.
That was all.
THE PART I UNDERSTAND DIFFERENTLY NOW
Today, a friend who knew us then wrote something under one of these posts.
She remembered that day.
She remembered driving around Port Harcourt with another friend, crying and searching desperately for a solution.
She too was convinced that Vivian had not gone.
She was even prepared to find someone, somewhere, who might help.
Twenty-five years later, reading her words reminded me:
I wasn’t the only person struggling to believe what had happened.
Different people were fighting the same reality in different places.
Perhaps that is something grief sometimes does.
Before we learn how to live with what cannot be changed, we may spend some time desperately trying to change it.
FOR THE MIRROR
Most people reading this have probably never walked into a mortuary to pray for someone to rise.
But perhaps you recognize the impulse underneath it.
“Please let this not be true.”
Maybe you kept calling a phone.
Maybe you couldn’t move someone’s belongings.
Maybe you woke up and, for a few seconds, forgot.
Maybe you bargained with God.
Maybe you kept waiting for the diagnosis to be wrong.
Maybe you kept believing the relationship could somehow return to what it had been.
Maybe your story has nothing to do with death at all.
Sometimes the human heart takes longer than the mind to accept that something has ended.
And perhaps we should be gentle with ourselves about that.
CLOSING THOUGHT
I went to that mortuary hoping to leave with Vivian.
I left without her.
Eventually, I would have to learn something much harder than how to bring her back.
I would have to learn how to keep living when she wasn’t coming back.
TOMORROW
But grief wasn’t the only thing waiting for me after Vivian died.
Loss entered a family.
And sometimes people who are grieving the same person do not know how to grieve together.
