My uncle was cremated yesterday.

We all said the appropriate prayers the night before, and we knelt on straw mats and burned joss sticks and wore white shirts like we ought to.

Before they closed the coffin, they told us all to take a last good look at him, and we did, and most of us cried.

They moved the coffin into the van, and we walked behind it slowly, and holding to some semblance of tradition, wearing only thin socks that made us only too aware of the noontime asphalt beneath our feet.

Like all corteges, we cried.

And then, at the main road, we stopped to get into an airconditioned bus.

Somehow it only made me sadder-- while we were walking on the hot road it seemed at least fair: the ground burned our feet, but it definitely didn't hurt as much as dying. To follow behind in a comfortable bus seemed rather sacrilegious.

Mandai was strangely high-tech. They had all these machines to transport the coffins and everything. They wheeled the coffin into a service room, where we prayed one last time, and then this guy came and wheeled the coffin out. We watched the coffin move towards its cremation from afar, not carried by human hands but transported along this track, on an automated machine with doors that opened automatically.

It was extremely efficient, but somehow I can't shake this feeling of emptiness; I was already feeling kind of guilty for not getting to know him earlier, but seeing him sent off by machines, not us, made me feel even more guilty.

I don't know; maybe it's just PMS (hopefully).

And I felt totally like a huge idiot because I had to explain to Mr Toh why I needed to take leave of absence, and he was very sympathetic about it and somehow it made me cry :/ And then I think it might have kind of ruined his reputation a little bit, because all these teachers were staring and I think they might have thought that he made me cry by being mean or something.

Sigh.