Dying to Meet You: Confessions of a Funeral Director

Understand cross-cultural experiences of death

Navigate death and grieving with greater openness, honesty, and preparation thanks to the supportive expertise of Singapore’s leading “life celebrant.” Growing up with a hardworking undertaker father known as the Coffin King, death was the family business for Angjolie Mei—but that didn’t make it any easier to understand, or grief any easier to feel.

When her father died unexpectedly, leaving debts but no end of life instructions, Mei found herself taking up his funeral director business, not only to provide for her family, but to help others see death as an opportunity for dignity and celebration. “A funeral,” she writes, “is life’s graduation ceremony,” and we should honor it and plan for it accordingly.

Read on for a sneak peek at Dying to Meet You: Confessions of a Funeral Director by Angjolie Mei, available for preorder from our site or your local bookseller (shipping August 5th, 2025)!

“Many of my clients are dying to meet me.” That’s the clue I offer to strangers who ask me what I do for a living. Another one-liner that I sometimes throw out to break the ice is: “I have the best clients in the world because they never complain.”

I’m a funeral director. Some might think it’s bad luck to associate with someone of my profession, but the fact is that everyone will eventually need the kind of services I provide. The number of deaths in Singapore has been on the rise since 1960 and will not go down any time soon, given the country’s aging population. About 20,000 Singaporeans died in 2019, and the numbers have been on a slow but steady upward trend to 26,888 in 2023.

I have written this book, in part, because I want to lift the shroud of mystery that surrounds death in Singapore. There are misconceptions and ambiguity aplenty, but also a lot of curiosity about the topic. When I take part in panel discussions as part of seminars, forums, and talks, I am usually hit with a barrage of questions from the floor. People want to know what funeral directors do with the bodies of the dead, what to do when their loved ones die, and how the living should prepare for death. They are innately fascinated with death because it is not something encountered every day.

I also want to dispel stereotypes. Funeral directors—popularly called morticians—are a favorite feature in horror stories, and they are usually pale, grim, cadaverous men. In the past, when one thought of funeral directors in Singapore, the image that came to mind would be that of a Hokkien-speaking¹, chain-smoking middle-aged man in a singlet, who had ended up in what was thought of as a dead-end, pantang (inauspicious) job no one else wanted.

But funeral services have evolved over time, from largely ritualistic ceremonies to meaningful, carefully curated events. In essence, funeral directors are event planners. The nitty-gritty of what I do starts when I get a call from a client whose family member has died. I help the family organize the entire funeral event—from making sure the body looks presentable and acceptable to booking the venue for the wake and organizing it, and helping family members pick out their loved one’s cremains (cremated remains) after a funeral, right until their loved one is settled in their final resting place.

People often ask me why I chose to become a funeral director. I love my job. I view every funeral I do as a celebration of someone’s life. As we rejoice whenever babies are born, we should celebrate when people have completed their life journeys—remember the things they have done, the people they have touched, and the differences they have made. After all, a funeral is like life’s graduation ceremony; it is so very important. A funeral is not a day in a lifetime. It is a lifetime in a day.

I am one of a handful of certified funeral directors in Singapore—of which only a very small proportion are women— and the only certified funeral celebrant, which means that I am trained to organize funerals that reflect the personality and life story of the deceased. The religion of the dead and their families also determines how a funeral is conducted. Apart from Hindu and Muslim funerals, I have organized funerals for Christians, Catholics, Buddhists, Taoists, Soka practitioners, and freethinkers. In recent years, we have observed many funerals of mixed religions, such as a Muslim–Buddhist funeral we had not long ago. There was an imam and a Buddhist monk at the funeral wake at the same time; at the end of the three-day wake, Buddhist rituals were conducted for the deceased, who was then buried in a Muslim cemetery. So as you see, my job is incredibly fulfilling—one in which I have learned many life lessons through the funerals I have organized, and from the interesting people I have met.

Becoming a funeral director as part of my own life journey is a tale in itself. I never set out to become one. What I always say, when asked about my choice of profession, is that “I didn’t choose funeral directing. Funeral directing chose me.” As a child, I was scarred by encounters with death. But when my father, Ang Yew Seng, a pioneer in the Singapore funeral industry, died in 2004, I had to quit my job and support my mother in a male-dominated industry.

It is also fitting that a funeral director who talks all day long about remembrance should write her own biography, perhaps to distribute at her own funeral one day.

As you read this book about my life as a funeral director, you will unavoidably think about death. But also, think about your life—make it count and make it last. Because I hope I will not have to meet you for a long time yet.

Want to keep reading? Preorder Dying to Meet You: Confessions of a Funeral Director by Angjolie Mei, coming to a shelf near you later this summer!

1. A Southern Chinese dialect that is sometimes associated with a more gruff, working-class identity. ↩︎