Woman, 22, Takes Her Own Life From Being Haunted After Washing Dead Bodies At Work

A care worker ended her own life after her job terrified her from having to wash the corpses of dead bodies. Her parents told her story to Daily Record.

Taylor Watterson worked for Fullarton Care Home in Irvine and Shalom Care Home in Dreghorn. And part of her job as a care worker is to wash the dead bodies of the residents, and they caused her mental trauma enough to push her over the edge.

Andi and Lana McCleave, her parents, lost their 22-year-old daughter just days before Christmas and shared how the mental burden really hit her hard as she began isolating herself from her close ones.

“Her job had a lot to do with her mental health,” shared her mom, Lana from Ayrshire.

“One day, she asked if I knew how many dead bodies she’d washed. She’d lost count. I couldn’t believe it when she said it.”

She continued, “She was just a young girl and was having to do it regularly. Doing that over and over again and seeing residents she was close to regularly passing away was hard for her to take.”

Her dad added, “She couldn’t dissociate from it. She told me it was one or two people a week that she was looking after that she was losing. The only other line of work that would happen in at that age would be a soldier in a war zone.”

“What sort of effect did that have on the mental health of the carers? People they had been looking after for months and years were just gone within days of each other. They had looked after these people and built up rapports with them. Then they were just gone.”

“To have a young girl sitting there telling you this was heartbreaking,” said Andi, before adding that Taylor did seek help and was prescribed medication to calm her down.

Fullarton Care Home’s spokesperson shared about the young woman, “Everyone at Fullarton Care Home who knew Ms. Watterson when she worked here in 2019 is deeply saddened to learn of her passing. Our deepest sympathies are with her family and friends.”

“We will remember her fondly as one of life’s natural carers, someone who easily built strong relations with the people she cared for and who was determined to bring joy to our Residents’ lives through her kindness and compassion.”

Andi and Lana became invested in helping out other grieving families and started fundraising to be donated to organizations focused on providing mental support. The couple also organized a sponsored climb at Goatfell, located on the Isle of Arran.

They’ve donated £1,200 to Beautiful Inside & Out, a mental health charity that provides counseling for suicide bereaved families. But they’re planning to spread the donation to more than one charity. Andi shared their desperation, “We need to feel as though we are helping because that’s what’s keeping us going.”

“It’s hard enough for us to get out of bed in the morning, but we want to dedicate as much time as we can to this and raising awareness. We will do as much as we can to stop one other family going through this. If we can help one person, it’s been worth it. We were lucky we had a great support network around us to help.”

“When suicide happens, it’s not just the loss of that person – everybody round about is affected,” he continued. “There’s very little help for the individual, and there’s no help for families, and that’s what we are trying to change. We need to try and get more help for people.”