Buried or Burnt, You're Still Dead - Siva Choy

Absolutely love Siva Choy's gripes in his Sunday columns :

DURING my school days, cemeteries were very quiet and therefore ideal places to study for school exams.

The only interruption was the occasional passerby nodding to express his condolences, some idiot wanting to know if I was praying for 4-D numbers or a suspicious watchman accusing me of placing a Coke bottle on the angel's head.

I only dreaded the coming of the night because it was too dark to read anything.

Since then, I've watched the cemeteries disappear and all the people asleep under 'Rest In Peace' headstones being rehoused in multi-storey apartments called columbariums.

Some of these ex-people had their remains cremated and the ashes stored in urns in the homes of sentimental relatives.

(An absent-minded old uncle used such an urn as an ashtray and an absent-minded old auntie looking into it months later thought her dead relative had put on weight.)

Cremation seems the way to go for many folks but some countries, where religion demands burial, have worked out a timeshare scheme where the deceased gets a full burial but is dug up after a decent interval and cremated so that someone else can use his space.

The priests are okay with this economical arrangement, even if it subjects one family to two un-economical funerals.

I'm sure the people who bequeathed the land won't mind if their descendants make productive use of the graves too. Anyway, only the rich and powerful retain graves over centuries - or so we think.

Nobody knows where the remains of Zheng He, Alexander The Great, Mozart or Hang Tuah really are, except maybe tourism department marketing execs.

Some people are nervous about living in apartments built over graves but it would take a very powerful ghost to crawl out of a grave when there's a 16-storey HDB block sitting over his doorway.

I used to live next to an ancient gravesite and walked past the exposed tombstones late at night. The only people who got a scare were the ones I met in the shadows of the palm trees.

Someone who is drawing up his will (he's only 17 but plans far ahead and will probably become a successful minister planning national development or church minister planning funerals) asked my advice on which way he should go. I recommended a Viking funeral - plonking his corpse on a boat, setting the boat alight and setting it drift into the sunset with prayers that it wouldn't swing around and float into our East Coast beach.

I asked him to lighten up (oops!) and enjoy life while he can. I hope he does because it is a, well, grave matter.