Gabriella's Goodbye Photo Album Above
IT WAS the kind of Phuket funeral everyone dreads. There was not one single mourner. Not one.
After 60 years on planet Earth, Gabriella Rose-Marie Strand was being farewelled by two people who were both paid to be there: the undertaker and his assistant.
The leader of the four Phuket monks who were about to chant a ceremony for Ms Strand decided this was not proper, not riap roi. Usually, when even the poorest Thai is farewelled, mourners can be found. People understand this basic need. They come to funerals because they sense what it means to be farewelled by no-one.
But for Gabriella Rose-Marie Strand, a luckless Swede who spent the last years of her life as an international freeloader, a tropical island holiday hobo, no mourners came today.
Sixty years, probably a full and active life if not a conventional one, and only two people at her funeral. Two people, both paid to be there.
Reporter Chutima Sidasathian made up the numbers because she is a Buddhist, and because the monks asked her to join the ceremony. She poured the small jar of ritual water that would later be splashed outside to nourish a tree at Phuket's Get Ho temple as a sign of renewal.
The monks chanted. A cat, perhaps sensing the awesome loneliness of Gabriella in her final moments, wandered in and took its place, lounging among the mourners.
Around the monks was the setting for a much grander funeral to come, with a shiny golden casket already in place and scores of wreaths. But in Gabriella's case, the symbolic white thread that is always a key part of Buddhist cremations ran from the monks and out across a tiny courtyard to her coffin, a container as simple as her life had been in recent times.
She and her Swedish companion, Bjorn Lennart Lundqvist, made at least seven trips backwards and forwards between Sweden and Phuket in the final years of her life, apparently enjoying their flights to the sunshine and their freeloading escapades.
Gabriella died covered in sand, we were told by the man who washed her body clean for the last time. In all probability, she spent her last night sleeping on Phuket's Patong beach.
Somehow, despite the reputation of Sweden's social services to help every citizen in need, the system in the end failed Gabriella because she enjoyed putting it to the test.
She died alone, apparently collapsing in a Phuket shorefront restaurant. Then, according to the single-page official document marking her death, she suffered fatal electrocution when her leg contacted live wires under a refrigerator.
At today's funeral, the farewell for a most regular companion, an apparent soulmate, Lundqvist is nowhere to be seen. He may not even know that Gabriella is dead, which would be sad.
But talk has it that he has moved on, still living close to the edge in Thailand, but with a new companion.
We watch as Gabriella's remains are consigned to the flames. The chipboard top of the coffin is removed first, probably because it can be reused.
Tonight her cremated ashes will be on a bus to Bangkok, with the undertaker. Soon, she will be on her way home to Sweden.
There will be no more sunshine in Phuket for Gabriella, who died alone and had no-one to mourn her.
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Really sad ending. At least in your report, she becomes a memory for some.
Posted by Lena on June 11, 2010 19:25