Stuart Wolfendale

Did you know that the St. James’s Settlement has a ‘funeral navigation service’? Its offices are just down the road from me and even above the 28 mini bus gear grinding up the hill, I swear I can hear cries of ‘Undertaker off the port bow”. “Florist amidships.” and “Grave ahoy!” One burial bouy they are giving a very wide berth to though is the eco-coffin, made of cardboard which, with the inevitability of death itself, is becoming popular in Japan.

Not in Hong Kong, according to the mortuary matelotes at the Settelement. “Not one elderly person we have spoken to has been open to the idea.” they said. By the time we reach our coffin the only thing that’s open is the lid but people will insist on having prior ideas on these matters and who can deny them? This will disappoint Carrie Yau, Permanent Secretary for Health, Welfare, Food and, all those failing, the Dead. She has been to Japan to watch them burn corrugated paper coffins and presumably their occupants. What with Carrie Lam of Home Affairs going to China to pick pandas, you just can’t keep a good Permanent Secretary or a Carrie at home these days and Carrie Y was excited by what she saw. She has handed out leaflets on the subject to hospitals, where cheers went up in intensive care, old people’s homes where staff read them out loud at bed time and mortuaries where they were passed avidly from tray to tray. Less enthused, naturally, are the boys and girls in the coffin making business which uses up rain forest the size of Wales every month so that corpses can lie in a ransom-priced wooden box for a day or so before all is burnt to a crisp in a minute. Their real objection is that instead of paying easily twenty thousand dollars for a sliver of Borneo, the bereaved only have to fork out one thousand for a large, sturdy egg box. They have to put the lid on that of course which leaves them with some paper thin technical excuses. One prominent local lady coffin maker said that in Japan and Europe, funeral ceremonies ‘take a day’ whereas in Hong Kong the bodies lie in funeral homes for a few days. They sometimes ‘release water’ and she feared the boxes would get all soggy in the interim. First of all, I have to tell this lady that the whole of Europe has converted to neither Islam nor Judaism lately. We do not dispatch the dead within twenty four hours of expiry. They can lie around for days-even a couple of weeks- without the blink of an eyelid. European undertakers are devilish little technocrats and keep the corpses in fridges or very chilly rooms. They do not lay them ready dressed and painted in satin lined teak at room temperature for days at a time. As for leakage, the body released from social constraints releases more or less what it wants when it wants but what, may I ask, are funeral directors all about? By the time the eye-dabbing relatives come to view Aunt Lavinia, there is very little of the original auntie left below the high necked blouse and certainly any troublesome bits of stuffing will have been removed or well bunged up. In any event, and these are very basic ones, there are always bin-liners. My dear old Mum passed away in her sleep at 80 last August. She was cremated nine days later. We viewed her body actually in its coffin less than twenty four hours before the cremation. Up to then it had been in a fridge.Whatever your view on the soul and the after life, my mother was not in that box-not even close. Wherever she was , I am sure she was taking a very light hearted view of what was left behind so, as I watched our briefly owned piece of rain forest disappear behind a curtain the next morning, I wondered, fleetingly,  if there was a better way. Now Carrie comes from Japan with good news of man sized egg boxes. For the environment and the wallet and pall-bearers I hope they catch on.