Death showing in Theatre 6 at 2.15 pm
My Grandmother passed away in January 2005. She was cremated in Singapore. This was written over the course of the past year as I found the words.
It was a traditional Chinese wake, for 7 days and 7 nights my grandmother's coffin was accompanied by her sons, daughters and grandchildren. For 168 hours her spirit watched scores of relatives, friends, old neighbours, colleagues, hangers-on, strangers, all stop by to pay their respects and have a free meal.
Grandchildren that barely remembered her when she was lucid sat beside those that she babysat and reared to teenage. Her 83 years were eccentric, obstinate and independent for the most part. Her last 5 years were spent in a fog of lost memories and home nurses.
Now that she's gone, one would think she was looking down at these many visitors with some pride. Except those that knew her well knew, deep down inside, that Grandma would have snorted derisively at the visitors and would list all the dirty secrets she knew, real or made up.
Grandma always paid little respect to pomp and ceremony, she preferred the simple and the self-made, any day.
Which made the end of the funeral an exercise in irony.
We set off with the procession, boarded the vehicles and went to the crematorium. All 60 or so family members filed out of the aircon bus booked for this day, led by chanting Buddhist nuns. Grandpa did not come. The younger saw off the elder, not the other way around.
The crematorium director stood by the teak doors, waving us into the auditorium. Cold gusts of aircon ruffled the hair as we filed into the pristine, immaculately maintained multi-faith, all-purpose universal hall. The altar was ambivalently neither ornate nor simple, the pews were unadorned, ready to be filled with Buddhists, Methodists, Catholics, or pagans. The walls carried no symbols, just smooth carvings of vague shapes that could have been Ganesha, Christ, Tua Peh Kong.
We lined up and looked upon the nuns at the altar, chanting the last sutra over the coffin. The droning sounds grew in proportion with my unease. Surely this multi-functional hall wasn’t it? This impersonal one-hall-fits-all-faiths couldn’t be the way we were saying goodbye?
The walls behind the altar opened, and the coffin moved. It was then that I noticed the coffin was sitting on a conveyor belt. It was swallowed by the walls, and there was silence.
My 8-year-old cousin started to sniffle, and she crept closer to me. She doesn't remember grandma, but something in the air was disturbing. "Is it over?" she whispered. Before I could answer her, a side wall panel slides open and the director appeared soundlessly, smoothly, deferentially. "This way please," he waved, and we all dutifully filed out, making way for the next coffin behind us, which one could make out approaching from a distance.
I breathed a silent sigh of relief that it was over. Then promptly swallowed my breath again when I saw where we were being led.
An LED ticker display, not unlike the one that announced stock prices over Wall Street, repeated in arranged red dots:
Mdm Tan Kee Eng, 2.15 pm, Theatre 6.
Blink blink, blinkety blink.
I walked on, suspended in disbelief, following my relatives into a viewing gallery. It could have been one of those from the planetarium for a 5 minute star show.
We stood in rank and file. We looked through the glass wall without speaking. The nuns continued chanting, the only sounds in the eerie room.
The glass wall overlooked a cavernous white room, sterile and unadorned, empty except for a conveyor belt. We watched in mute horror as that now-familiar coffin smoothly slid in on the belt, gliding quietly to the back of the empty white cell. Another white panel in the back soundlessly opened, and the coffin slid through, slowly disappearing from sight.
The white panel slid closed, becoming invisible among the rest of the walls. We couldn't look away, all staring hard at the white walls. The chanting had stopped. In the stunned silence, I thought I heard a muted boom. I could have imagined it, I could have imagined grandma to have left this earth with more than just a soundless glide of a conveyor belt and the smooth hiss of a shiny white wall behind a glass window.
It was over.
Coda: First uncle said with gusto, on the bus ride back. "Isn’t modern technology wonderful? Remember the old days when bodies would burn for 3 days and 3 nights? Now you can pick up the ashes the next day!"
It was a traditional Chinese wake, for 7 days and 7 nights my grandmother's coffin was accompanied by her sons, daughters and grandchildren. For 168 hours her spirit watched scores of relatives, friends, old neighbours, colleagues, hangers-on, strangers, all stop by to pay their respects and have a free meal.
Grandchildren that barely remembered her when she was lucid sat beside those that she babysat and reared to teenage. Her 83 years were eccentric, obstinate and independent for the most part. Her last 5 years were spent in a fog of lost memories and home nurses.
Now that she's gone, one would think she was looking down at these many visitors with some pride. Except those that knew her well knew, deep down inside, that Grandma would have snorted derisively at the visitors and would list all the dirty secrets she knew, real or made up.
Grandma always paid little respect to pomp and ceremony, she preferred the simple and the self-made, any day.
Which made the end of the funeral an exercise in irony.
We set off with the procession, boarded the vehicles and went to the crematorium. All 60 or so family members filed out of the aircon bus booked for this day, led by chanting Buddhist nuns. Grandpa did not come. The younger saw off the elder, not the other way around.
The crematorium director stood by the teak doors, waving us into the auditorium. Cold gusts of aircon ruffled the hair as we filed into the pristine, immaculately maintained multi-faith, all-purpose universal hall. The altar was ambivalently neither ornate nor simple, the pews were unadorned, ready to be filled with Buddhists, Methodists, Catholics, or pagans. The walls carried no symbols, just smooth carvings of vague shapes that could have been Ganesha, Christ, Tua Peh Kong.
We lined up and looked upon the nuns at the altar, chanting the last sutra over the coffin. The droning sounds grew in proportion with my unease. Surely this multi-functional hall wasn’t it? This impersonal one-hall-fits-all-faiths couldn’t be the way we were saying goodbye?
The walls behind the altar opened, and the coffin moved. It was then that I noticed the coffin was sitting on a conveyor belt. It was swallowed by the walls, and there was silence.
My 8-year-old cousin started to sniffle, and she crept closer to me. She doesn't remember grandma, but something in the air was disturbing. "Is it over?" she whispered. Before I could answer her, a side wall panel slides open and the director appeared soundlessly, smoothly, deferentially. "This way please," he waved, and we all dutifully filed out, making way for the next coffin behind us, which one could make out approaching from a distance.
I breathed a silent sigh of relief that it was over. Then promptly swallowed my breath again when I saw where we were being led.
An LED ticker display, not unlike the one that announced stock prices over Wall Street, repeated in arranged red dots:
Mdm Tan Kee Eng, 2.15 pm, Theatre 6.
Blink blink, blinkety blink.
I walked on, suspended in disbelief, following my relatives into a viewing gallery. It could have been one of those from the planetarium for a 5 minute star show.
We stood in rank and file. We looked through the glass wall without speaking. The nuns continued chanting, the only sounds in the eerie room.
The glass wall overlooked a cavernous white room, sterile and unadorned, empty except for a conveyor belt. We watched in mute horror as that now-familiar coffin smoothly slid in on the belt, gliding quietly to the back of the empty white cell. Another white panel in the back soundlessly opened, and the coffin slid through, slowly disappearing from sight.
The white panel slid closed, becoming invisible among the rest of the walls. We couldn't look away, all staring hard at the white walls. The chanting had stopped. In the stunned silence, I thought I heard a muted boom. I could have imagined it, I could have imagined grandma to have left this earth with more than just a soundless glide of a conveyor belt and the smooth hiss of a shiny white wall behind a glass window.
It was over.
Coda: First uncle said with gusto, on the bus ride back. "Isn’t modern technology wonderful? Remember the old days when bodies would burn for 3 days and 3 nights? Now you can pick up the ashes the next day!"
posted by tygertyger at 1:00 AM
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