As the coffin of 92-year-old Lim Kim Guan was carried out of a hearse, the puzzled crematorium officer asked undertaker Roland Tay: “Where is his family?”
“We are his family,” Tay replied with a wan smile, gesturing to himself and his wife at the funeral of the elderly man who died penniless and alone in a welfare home.
Two helpers and a Buddhist monk formed the rest of the funeral party on a hot and humid afternoon last month.
PHOTO: AFP
Tay, 63, is an undertaker with a charitable mission: looking after the destitute dead, from senior citizens abandoned by their families to foreign workers and executed criminals.
“I think what I do is very meaningful. I’m in the funeral line, so I can help the destitute and the poor people in the community,” Tay said in an interview.
While most people’s idea of charity work involves financial and other forms of support for the the living, Tay makes sure that society’s forgotten will be taken care of after they die.
Typical funerals in Singapore are pricey affairs, costing around S$5,000 (US$3,500) for the embalming of the corpse, a coffin, a three-day wake and transport to the crematorium or graveyard.
“I help any religion, any nationality. As long as there was life, I will help them,” said Tay, who considers himself a free thinker.
The stout, clean-shaven man, who owns Direct Singapore Funeral Services, has laid to rest more than more than 100 dead people free of charge in the 20-odd years he has been in the business.
Identity cards belonging to his beneficiaries rest in a stack at a corner of his office desk.
“I’ve seen so many kinds of cases where they are very poor, destitute, people with financial problems, breadwinners who die and the children and the wife who are left behind are helpless ... and I feel very sad,” he said.
Some were victims of grisly murders or suicides, making Tay a bit of a local celebrity.
One of the most famous cases was dubbed the “Kallang body parts murder” by the Singapore media in June 2005.
A 22-year-old Chinese woman, Liu Hong Mei, disappeared and her corpse was found chopped into seven pieces and discarded in five different places including the Kallang River.
Tay, who conducted Liu’s funeral, had to piece together her dismembered corpse, which proved difficult as a portion of one leg was missing and various parts were in different stages of decay.
“Me and my wife, we both went to see how we could make her beautiful and in one piece and dress her up,” he said, calling it the most heart-wrenching case he had ever handled.
Tay also handled the funeral of Nguyen Tuong Van, a Vietnamese Australian hanged in Singapore for drug trafficking in 2005.
“I do not bother about what his crime was. I only bother that his mother was here, and really had no money,” Tay said.
Tay’s philantrophy also involves counseling and fund-raising for the families left behind.
In one case, a Singaporean man committed suicide by jumping in front of a train because he was heavily in debt and could not pay for his sickly wife and children’s medical bills.
Tay organized a press conference, which generated an outpouring of public sympathy, and within five days he raised S$500,000.
The widow offered him S$100,000 in gratitude but he donated the sum to various charities instead.
“Heart is very important, when you do all this, it’s very meaningful and there’s karma for me,” said Tay, citing the Hindu concept of reaping what one sows.
The most unusual funeral carried out by Tay involved Ah Meng, a female Sumatran orangutan from the Singapore Zoo who in life had been the face of the city-state’s massive tourism industry.
Ah Meng’s remains are buried in a prominent part of the zoo overlooking a scenic man-made lake.
“Ah Meng is a Singapore icon,” Tay said. “Singapore is very proud of her.”
Kehinde Sanni spends his days smoothing out dents and repainting scratched bumpers in a modest autobody shop in Lagos. He has never left Nigeria, yet he speaks glowingly of Burkina Faso military leader Ibrahim Traore. “Nigeria needs someone like Ibrahim Traore of Burkina Faso. He is doing well for his country,” Sanni said. His admiration is shaped by a steady stream of viral videos, memes and social media posts — many misleading or outright false — portraying Traore as a fearless reformer who defied Western powers and reclaimed his country’s dignity. The Burkinabe strongman swept into power following a coup in September 2022
‘FRAGMENTING’: British politics have for a long time been dominated by the Labor Party and the Tories, but polls suggest that Reform now poses a significant challenge Hard-right upstarts Reform UK snatched a parliamentary seat from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labor Party yesterday in local elections that dealt a blow to the UK’s two establishment parties. Reform, led by anti-immigrant firebrand Nigel Farage, won the by-election in Runcorn and Helsby in northwest England by just six votes, as it picked up gains in other localities, including one mayoralty. The group’s strong showing continues momentum it built up at last year’s general election and appears to confirm a trend that the UK is entering an era of multi-party politics. “For the movement, for the party it’s a very, very big
ENTERTAINMENT: Rio officials have a history of organizing massive concerts on Copacabana Beach, with Madonna’s show drawing about 1.6 million fans last year Lady Gaga on Saturday night gave a free concert in front of 2 million fans who poured onto Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro for the biggest show of her career. “Tonight, we’re making history... Thank you for making history with me,” Lady Gaga told a screaming crowd. The Mother Monster, as she is known, started the show at about 10:10pm local time with her 2011 song Bloody Mary. Cries of joy rose from the tightly packed fans who sang and danced shoulder-to-shoulder on the vast stretch of sand. Concert organizers said 2.1 million people attended the show. Lady Gaga
SUPPORT: The Australian prime minister promised to back Kyiv against Russia’s invasion, saying: ‘That’s my government’s position. It was yesterday. It still is’ Left-leaning Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese yesterday basked in his landslide election win, promising a “disciplined, orderly” government to confront cost-of-living pain and tariff turmoil. People clapped as the 62-year-old and his fiancee, Jodie Haydon, who visited his old inner Sydney haunt, Cafe Italia, surrounded by a crowd of jostling photographers and journalists. Albanese’s Labor Party is on course to win at least 83 seats in the 150-member parliament, partial results showed. Opposition leader Peter Dutton’s conservative Liberal-National coalition had just 38 seats, and other parties 12. Another 17 seats were still in doubt. “We will be a disciplined, orderly
RSS