The Sunday Mail
Gilbert Munetsi
Inasfar as soulless professions go, being an undertaker is the most lifeless profession one can pursue.
With duties that entail embalming, burying or cremating the dead, as well as planning the actual funeral ceremony, the profession constitutes just a fraction of the world’s job sector.
However, for Mr Michael Galio, the profession is, for lack of a better description, an art!
“I’m blessed with the artistic skill to make the dead appear more life-like when they depart this world for the next,” said the 47-year-old.
“It is all about making family, friends and acquaintances remember their departed in the same way they knew them during their days. You could say that I’m like a carpenter with a chisel and hammer, or the potter with mortar and water.”
Mr Galio begins each day more or less like everybody else with a prayer. He asks God for the ability to overcome the challenges that lie ahead.
After a quick bath, the pencil-slim undertaker heads for his unassuming workplace where he goes about the duties he has been performing over the past three decades — preparing the dead for burial.
To the ordinary person, Mr Galio is your run-of-the-mill undertaker, but to those in the know, you could call him the celebrity undertaker.
From as early as 1982, he has been a familiar figure at the National Heroes’ Acre, driving the hearse and leading pall-bearers as the nation bids farewell to many a hero.
It is, therefore, to be expected that he is not able to remember all of the big names he has helped bid farewell.
From the top of the head, the names that came to his mind were the likes of the late First Lady, Amai Sally Mugabe, Cabinet ministers Christopher and Herbert Ushewokunze, Moven Mahachi and Morris Nyagumbo.
Away from the National Shrine, he also laid to rest comedian Safirio Madzikatire (aka Mukadota) and the late Dendera music frontman Simon Chimbetu, who was declared a provincial liberation war hero and buried in Chinhoyi.
Born to a Portuguese father and a Zimbabwean mother, Mr Galio comes from a family of nine.
Unfortunately, he was introduced to tragedy very early in his life, as he lost both his parents at a tender age, a fact he now says helped him pick a career.
It seems the dark ordeal took away part of his heart and swept away the fear of death.
The path was made clearer later in life as, apart from spending most of his childhood in the solitude of boarding school, he developed a keen interest in the profession, watching big black hearses being driven by whites.
That ignited his curiosity.
“I was always eager to find out what was contained in that vehicle, why everywhere it went it would leave people wailing and why it moved so slowly.”
Starting adulthood as a radio operator in the Ministry of Defence, he later applied for a job in the administration department of a Harare-based funeral parlour.
His break then came when the official undertaker failed to report for duty one day. He volunteered to stand in for him immediately.
Given the fact that he has dealt with death for the past three decades on a daily basis, one would naturally assume Mr Galio has by now gained some insight or secrets into life itself or, at the very least, developed a thick skin on the subject.
“No, death remains shocking territory to me too. This is despite the fact that I work with and around it every day. And yes, I’m very, very much afraid of it such that I would not set my eyes on someone about to lose his or her life.
“I cannot even stand the sight of a fly being squashed to death, but when life has departed and the body is still, ah, then bring it to me because I’m the best person to attend to it,” he said.
On the thrills, spills and anecdotes of his profession, he said: “We receive bodies that range from natural deaths to those badly damaged in accidents or found in very advanced stages of decomposition. Training and experience has taught us to be exceptional public relations practitioners.
“We don’t, for instance, spit because of the odour a corpse emits. That is both uncultured and unprofessional. In latter circumstances, the challenge is to properly dress the deceased; so we usually ask families to forgo body-viewing.
“The second challenge we face is repatriating a body from or to a foreign destination when there is insufficient documentation. This results in unanticipated delays and a lot of impatience on the part of the affected families.
“We also have situations when there is disagreement among family members on the type of burial or the burial place itself. Either way, we have to bear with them because patience is a virtue,” says Mr Galio, who says he converted to Christianity many years ago.
“The day that stands out for me took place at Warren Hills Cemetery some years ago when we were burying a 30-something-year-old father of a five-year-old boy. When the priest had read from the Bible and said the parting prayer, I readied myself to lower the coffin into the grave.
“Suddenly, out of the blue, the deceased’s young son darted to the fore, grabbed my jacket by the vent and tore it right up to the collar. It later dawned on everyone that it was some form of protest, as he visualised me as the devil that was taking his father where he would not see him again. It was an extremely sad scene.
“Then there are times when the hearse’s engine just cuts off when you are on the way to a burial site. A few words from the relatives (usually the daughters-in-law), and the engine kicks as if nothing had been wrong in the first place.”
Now promoted to the position of training manager, Mr Galio reckons many people still view undertaking from a negative perspective. This, he says, is evident in the nature of the “recruits” he has to take through the mill.
“Sometimes by the end of the very first day you realise that half the class has vanished because as you are progressing, they are visualising and dreading the deep end.
“It is for this reason that I ask each candidate during the oral interviews whether they have experienced the death of a close family member before. If the answer is ‘yes’, then I know they will last.
“At times you don’t get that far because you can see the fear written all over the job-seeker’s face.”
On how he wants to be buried, the undertaker said, “When that time finally comes, all I want is for my body to be prepared by someone I have trained because I will be rest assured that they will do it in the exact way that I would have wanted it done.
“I’m not Hindu, so the option of cremation is out. I would, therefore, prefer a very modest burial with an ordinary coffin (no casket for me please!) and very few people from my family and the neighbourhood in attendance. Nothing fancy.”
