GENERATIONAL SHIFT IN ATTITUDES TOWARDS DEATH
With more than two decades of experience in the field, funeral director Ang Ziqian has seen how attitudes towards death have changed with the times.
“When I was young, pre-planning was quite common in my grandfather’s time,” said the managing director of Ang Chin Moh Funeral Directors.
Hailing from a line of funeral parlour predecessors, Mr Ang is the fourth generation of his family to work in this field.
According to Mr Ang, migrant workers that first came to Singapore would often buy a casket so that they could be repatriated to their homeland after death.
“When Singapore started to prosper and people had money, (people) became scared to die. This is one of the reasons why they don’t talk about death and dying,” Mr Ang said.
Where cemeteries were commonly found in the past, modernisation and urban planning began pushing cemeteries to rural areas such as Lim Chu Kang and Mandai, separating death from the living, he added.
“There’s an artificial divide, so people won’t talk about it because it’s not in your face.”
NTU’s Dr Ho, who runs an undergraduate psychology module called The Last Dance: Psycho-Socio-Cultural Perspectives on Death, Dying and Bereavement to educate students about the topic, described the attitudes towards death here as a “paradox”.
“On the one hand, we’re very afraid of death. So when someone starts talking about death, we say ‘choi’ (a Cantonese word to ward off bad luck), they don’t want to talk about this. When they see a hearse coming, they walk in the other direction.”
People are afraid of death because they think of it as “bad luck” and believe that someone who is recently bereaved will “pollute” with their aura, he said.
“On the other hand, we’re also death worshipping – we have the Qing Ming festival, we have the ghost festival. And when these things occur, we celebrate death,” the associate professor noted.
These attitudes hark back to religious and philosophical teachings about karma and reincarnation, which tell of how your actions affect your afterlife.