The last rites: Mercy Mission ensures dignity in death

It is said there is no greater joy than helping others in distressed times. And, even during such testing times, many stories of courage and generosity have emerged.

Tanveer Ahmed is part of the Mercy Mission, An NGO with a group of volunteers committed to ensuring dignity in death. They perform the last rites for numerous claimed and unclaimed victims of COVID- 19, giving them traditional farewells in keeping with their respective faiths.

The rising death toll during the second wave of the pandemic made going to the city’s major graveyards and cremation grounds very difficult. Ambulances were hard to hire and bereaved families had to undergo great costs, prejudice and even harassment. A Christian cemetery denying burial to a Covid-19 patient was one instance that received media attention. The injustice prompted Tanveer to post a video on social media, appealing to various communities to help conduct the last rites of Covid patients.

The video received wide publicity and Tanveer was joined by a team of dedicated people under the Mercy Mission. The team began performing the last rites for the dead.

Tanveer told News Trail that their day would begin with “calls for help in cremations and burial grounds belonging to different communities, during the peak of the second wave. I have even cremated bodies which were not claimed by their families.”

He recalls a newborn baby, who had died of Covidrelated infections, being handed over to the team in a bag. Unable to hold back their tears, the volunteers broke down as they performed the last rites, for the baby had no family around it.

The Mission’s volunteers come from a diverse range of professions. Doctors, social workers, IT professionals, students and businessmen all work together as a team. The volunteers have also helped feed the needy, who had no resources during the lockdown. This branched out into a number of initiatives like the distribution of ration kits across 300 localities in the city, ambulance teams with paramedical staff and trained volunteers on board and free oxygen cylinders to patients in quarantine. “We also started Mercy Plasma, to distribute free plasma. We arranged for donors and took the plasma to medical centres, where critically ill patients required it,” Tanveer explains.

Mercy Mission’s outreach has benefitted lakhs of people in Bengaluru since the pandemic broke out. The volunteers are still continuing their good work by helping distressed residents of the city.