Morning coffee and mourning

HOW WOULD YOU like coffee with a reminder of death?

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It sounds macabre at first, but at Myth Café in Makati, death is business as usual: aside from offering Filipino-forward drinks, the café doubles as an urn showroom for the creations of Samsara Designs, founded by friends Camille Ayala and Eber Sy (no relation to the conglomerate families).

During a visit on Oct. 25, the two ladies sat down with Business World over a cup of their hot chocolate (P260, made with Davao cacao tablea, served with a torched marshmallow). Ms. Ayala appeared ina black lace outfit, bells on her jewelry announcing her arrival. Ms. Sy wore a black T-shirt over white pants, and simple sandals.

Myth opened just this year, in June, but the urn business started in 2020 — a year of death, right smack in the misery of the COVID-19 pandemic. Ms. Sy says that she had planned to open a business related to the death industry since 2019 (caskets), but decided to scale down. The required cremations of remains and the rush of funerals during the pandemic gave them a bittersweet start.

Ms. Sy had been a frequent visitor of funeral homes due to deaths in the family during her childhood. This led to a fascination with death rituals (she’s quite cheerful if you meet her), and their expense.

“The funeral homes here in the Philippines, we just follow the death rituals of the US,” she said.

Based on her own observations and some of her studies, including of the book The American Way of Death by Jessica Mitford (a British noblewoman turned communist who used the book to criticize the expense of funerals; where grief is exploited for profit), Ms. Sy concluded, “