Mrs. Bolanle Okusanya-Feyita, the eldest child of the late founder of
MIC Funeral Services, Mr. Tunji Okusanya, in this interview with Punch,
revealed how she took over from her father and her husband's reaction
when he found out that she dresses dead bodies..Read below;
Not all men would embrace the idea of seeing their wives dealing with the dead. Did you meet your husband in the line of duty?
No. One of my friends, Tara Durotoye, introduced us. That was in 2004.
We were both make-up artists and we had been friends not very long when
she said to me that there was a guy she wanted me to meet. Then, I used
to shuttle between Nigeria and the UK. When I was in Nigeria, people
would think I had a relationship in the UK and when in the UK, people
would think I had someone I was dating in Nigeria, whereas I didn’t have
anyone. For the fact that she was one of my new friends, I didn’t want
it to look that I was proud. So I told her to give my number to the
person. I just wanted to be polite. The ‘guy’ called me and here we are
today. From when we met, he said he wanted to get married and I told him
to come off it, because we had barely known each other. He said he was
sure he wanted to get married. I said we should court first. Thus, we
got married in 2007. It could have been earlier but we ended up in 2007.
Did he know the kind of job you were into?
No, he didn’t. The first time he knew, he was horrified; shocked. He
couldn’t believe it, thinking it was a joke. But I told him that was
what my dad was into. He was shocked but after a while, he got used to
it. It was more so because he had not lost anyone close to him or had a
close contact with funerals. And people used to tell him, ‘how can you
marry that man’s daughter? Do you know what the man does? Do you know
that the man has secret powers, etc. But he got used to it after a while
and he became very close to my parents.
Are your children also comfortable with your work?
They see pictures of caskets on my phone all the time. Sometimes, they go with me to events, but they don’t see corpses.
Some people feel it is difficult to do this kind of work without having some spiritual reinforcement. Is that true?
My dad was a Christian; nothing added. All he knew to do was to fast and
pray, and he was a member of the choir since when he was six. God is
all we have. I think of this work like a calling, in the sense that the
underlying thing of what we do is to help people at a very difficult
time. The truth is, everybody is going to die. Our relationship does not
end with people because they are dead. There is still a duty of care.
At the end of the day, somebody has to do it, so why can’t we do it with
a lot of excellence and compassion? There is nothing about death,
corpses and caskets that is scary.
