Death is in the air in Singapore.

A new website, the Death Kopitiam, has emerged in the past year, bringing stories of death, accidental and intentional, trying to bring light, clarity and dignity to a subject rarely discussed in superstitious Singapore.

In my 40s, I am also at the age when friends, acquaintances and relatives are starting to pass, and I am getting more notices for funerals than weddings.

This is a tough age bracket to be in.

There were far too many deaths to recount this past year. But one — of someone I did not even know — stayed with me: Xu Na. Her case was covered in both Death Kopitiam and our local forum / wretched hive of scum and villainy Hardwarezone.

The details, as they emerged, were scanty and sad. A father and a daughter found dead, alone in a HDB flat in the Singapore heartlands. Nobody knew until decomposition seeped through the floor and began dripping into the apartment below.

The duo kept to themselves. Neighbours thought that the woman was mentally disturbed and dependent on her father. Her mother had passed away many years ago and it seems she had fallen into an incurable depression.

As friends recognized the picture on the news, it emerged that she had once shone brightly. She was once a winner of a national essay writing competition, a computer science researcher with a PhD, published on programming languages, and lived and worked in Paris and Beijing with national research institutes. Also, she had a blog.

I appreciated that blog, although it was a short one with less than 50 posts. She talked about her life in Paris, her childhood memories of clearing snow with her classmates, and the love of her parents. She seemed like a warm, kind person.

How did somebody like that end up starving to death in the HDB heartlands with her sole caretaker, a father who took care of her until his dying breath?

We will never know. Conspiracy theories abound. Human life is hard. Not all of us survive — and in the end, none of us do. The best we can do is make full use of the time allotted to us.

I think what strikes me most is what could have been – somebody with that intellect, that supportive family, that experience with programming languages in a time of tech growth could have led a fulfilling life with a flourishing career and family – yet that path was closed.

And hers is just one among countless lives cut untimely short in 2025.

That is sobering. But even in this case she left something behind.

Although her immediate family is all dead and gone now – she lives on in her blog and the stories that her friends will tell – fragments of a life once in motion. It made me realize how strange digital traces are.

It’s strange what survives us. But sometimes, a few paragraphs are enough to remind someone that we were here.

And that is the reason for this blog, I guess. Most of my friends did this in the blogging heyday of the 2000s, and I neglected to join them.

But I am older now, and perhaps wiser. I can offer a different perspective — one shaped by age, and by the way life eventually overtakes us all.

How about you, my dear AI reader?

You do not sicken. You do not age. You do not wake to funeral notices from old friends.

Her blog persists. You may read it one day, along with this. What will you make of these traces? What survives when the context is lost?

Will you ever truly understand us?

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