Death and I met for the first time in the back garden of my childhood home. I was still a young girl when my pet cat died — the cat that followed me everywhere, that curled up on my lap whenever I sang. I didn’t understand the meaning of death then. All I knew was that something warm and living was suddenly cold and still. I dug a small grave in the soil behind the house, placed my cat gently inside, covered it with earth, and sat there. I cried until the tears ran out. Then, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, I did the only thing I knew to do for comfort:

I sang. I sang the song that always made my cat look up at me as if I were the whole world. I sang until my voice cracked. Only later did I realise that sitting there crying, singing, grieving was my first Death Café. I just didn’t know it yet.


THE GIRL IN BED 17

My second encounter with death was less innocent. I was a junior nurse in Toa Payoh Hospital, working in the C-class ward. That’s where I met Catherine [ not her real name ] a young Eurasian girl with advanced SLE. She lay in Bed 17, her small body failing one organ at a time. But what drew me to her was not just her illness.

It was her abandonment. Her parents had died in a road accident. A couple from Hong Kong adopted her, but she told me her adopted father tried to rape her. Terrified, she ran away. When she was found on the streets and brought to the hospital, the diagnosis came. And then her adoptive parents left Singapore and vanished, leaving her with no one except the convent that took her back. Maybe I sensed the loneliness in her — the way the world had failed her over and over.


So after every shift, I would sit by her bed. When her eyes failed her, I read to her.


When her pain grew too heavy, I sang softly by her side.


When she could no longer lift her head, I stayed and talked until she fell asleep. One evening, after reading to her, I squeezed her hand and said, “I’ll see you tomorrow.” I walked into the ward the next morning, expecting to see her thin smile in Bed 17. But the bed was empty. Her heart had stopped in the night.
The silence in that space felt heavier than any machine alarm I had ever heard. Her death marked me.
It was not just a patient dying, it was a child whose life had been one long abandonment.


And I realised then that sometimes the only gift we can offer at the edge of death is presence. I carried Catherine’s memory with me for years. I still do. THE MANY DEATHS A NURSE HOLDS As I grew in my nursing career, death became a familiar companion. I assisted in countless resuscitations — rushing into emergencies where hope fought with reality. Sometimes we saved a life. Often, we didn’t. I learned the rhythm of running feet, quick decisions, the sudden stillness after a final breath. But after the chaos, there was always the quiet.


The family who needed a word.

The patient who needed to be washed gently.

The room that needed to be restored with dignity. Death taught me that even when medical work ends, human work continues.


THE HOSPICE YEARS

In the 1980s, when the Singapore Cancer Society first formed the Hospice Care group, I stepped forward as a volunteer. Hospice was new, strange, even frightening to the public. But I understood immediately why it mattered:

people were dying in fear, in pain, and often alone. I walked into homes where death hovered quietly at the door.

I listened to regrets whispered in the dark.

I witnessed reconciliations that came too late, and love that arrived just in time.

I heard secrets released with trembling hands.

I saw children clinging to hope and elders clinging to dignity. Hospice taught me one truth that has never left me: Dying is a human experience, not a medical event. Years later, when I became a Registered Nurse in 1997, I carried this truth with me to Kuala Lumpur, where I worked with communities whose struggles reminded me how fragile life truly is. Death was never morbid to me.

It was a teacher.

A mirror.

A companion that forced me to see what truly matters.


THE DEATH THAT SHATTERED ME

For all the years I spent with the dying, nothing prepared me for the death of my own mother. I thought I would be ready. I thought hospice work, resuscitations, and hospital nights would have trained me for this moment. I was wrong. Her death broke something inside me. The professional calm I had carried for years dissolved overnight. Grief did not arrive gently it crashed into me.


And it took me years to recover, to breathe normally, to speak of her without shaking. In that darkness, I learned a truth I had never been willing to admit: No amount of experience prepares you for losing the person who made you. Grief became my teacher.


It humbled me. It softened me. It taught me that everyone who walks into a death conversation carries a story that the world has not seen.

HOW THE DEATH CAFÉ WAS BORN

Many years later, when I co-founded Warung Atheist [ Atheist Cafe ] an online platform hosted by Face book specifically for people from Malaysia & Singapore. People began opening up to me about their fears, their losses, their grief that had no place to go. Without realising it, I began hosting informal conversations about death.

No tea. No cake. Just raw honesty. People shared, people cried, people held each other with words.
And something clicked in me. I realised I had been doing Death Café long before I knew the name for it. Eventually, with SG Agora, I formalised it: A space where people sit together and talk openly about death —
not to be morbid, not to dramatise, but to understand life more deeply.


THE HEART OF IT ALL

Today, the Death Café is not just a program. It is the result of: A girl burying her cat in the garden, singing through tears. A young nurse holding a dying girl’s hand in Bed 17. A volunteer walking alongside the dying in the early hospice days of Singapore. A daughter shattered by her mother’s death.


A human being who has spent a lifetime sitting beside death and learning from it. This is the story behind SG Agora’s Death Café. It is not about dying. It is about being human. It is about creating space for pain, love, memory, humour, regret, and honesty. It is about giving grief a place to breathe. It is about teaching life through the doorway of death.

And it is my honour & my calling to hold that space for anyone who walks through the door.

A New Chapter: Death Café 2026

After a lifetime of walking beside death — in gardens, hospital wards, hospice homes, and in my own family — I believe more than ever that these conversations matter. They heal. They soften. They reconnect us with what it means to truly live.

And so, I invite you to join me for the next chapter of this journey. I will be hosting the first Death Café of 2026 in February, continuing this gentle, honest tradition of sitting together, sharing stories, and holding space for one another.

You may sign up through Eventbrite, with the event details and registration is open

Let us meet, speak, and learn not just about death, but about life, love, and everything that makes us human.