Reflections from a columbarium tour with my mother

The unusual, unprecedented experience was a reminder of all the small, irreplaceable things I would miss when she is gone.

- Ho Ai Li

Inside a small auditorium, my mother and I are seated at a white plastic table poring over the details of what the different packages would entail.

The three-day, two-night package does not include a buffet, the saleswoman advises us. Decide on a package and we can lock in the price against inflation, she tells us.

It was surreal: My mother and I were not weighing up holiday tours, but her future funeral.

Pantang, did I hear you say? I had thought so too. I had assumed that my 69-year-old mother, who consults an almanac to check the colour of the clothes she should be wearing for the day, would find it taboo to talk about end-of-life matters.

But my assumption was turned on its head a few weeks ago when she sent me a voice message to ask if I was free to accompany her on a tour.

I have been encouraging her to go for overseas holidays now that she has retired from her cashier job and has time. She has not travelled overseas in years, for reasons too complicated to go into, including some worries about her wobbly knees.

I would have loved to go with her on a belated and unprecedented mother-and-daughter trip on one of those residents' committee durian tours, a jaunt to Batam or better still, a tour to Malacca with artistes from Emerald Hill - The Little Nyonya Story. But no, my mother had signed up for a Nirvana Cultural Tour, which sounds like a Buddhist pilgrimage.

It was actually a day tour to Nirvana Memorial Garden, situated at Old Choa Chu Kang Road and facing the Muslim cemetery. Yes, a tour of a columbarium, which includes two-way transport, vegetarian lunch and a pit stop at a vegetable market.

"It's free," my thrifty mother said sheepishly.

I thought to myself, "Aiyo, of course, it's free. Who would want to go?"

'WHICH LI IS YOUR LI?'

As it turns out, quite a lot of people do want to go to Nirvana.