Morning coffee and mourning

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RAJA CERAMIC URN — SAMSARA.PH

LAYA URN — SAMSARA.PH

HOW WOULD YOU like coffee with a reminder of death?

It sounds macabre at first, but at Myth Café in Makati, death is business as usual: aside from offering Filipino-forward drinks, the café doubles as an urn showroom for the creations of Samsara Designs, founded by friends Camille Ayala and Eber Sy (no relation to the conglomerate families).

During a visit on Oct. 25, the two ladies sat down with BusinessWorld over a cup of their hot chocolate (P260, made with Davao cacao tablea, served with a torched marshmallow). Ms. Ayala appeared in a black lace outfit, bells on her jewelry announcing her arrival. Ms. Sy wore a black T-shirt over white pants, and simple sandals.

Myth opened just this year, in June, but the urn business started in 2020 — a year of death, right smack in the misery of the COVID-19 pandemic. Ms. Sy says that she had planned to open a business related to the death industry since 2019 (caskets), but decided to scale down. The required cremations of remains and the rush of funerals during the pandemic gave them a bittersweet start.

Ms. Sy had been a frequent visitor of funeral homes due to deaths in the family during her childhood. This led to a fascination with death rituals (she’s quite cheerful if you meet her), and their expense.

“The funeral homes here in the Philippines, we just follow the death rituals of the US,” she said.

Based on her own observations and some of her studies, including of the book The American Way of Death by Jessica Mitford (a British noblewoman turned communist who used the book to criticize the expense of funerals; where grief is exploited for profit), Ms. Sy concluded, “Nakaka-konsensya (it triggered my conscience).” From her initial plans to open a new kind of funeral home (something less gloomy, as per her memories), she tried her hand at designing caskets, then switched to cremation urns, as part of her own ethical decisions. “It’s a lesser evil,” she said, citing her concerns about the environmental effects of embalming fluid, and the land use for burials.

When the women started the urn business, they had two lines: the premier Samsara urns (P20,000 to P45,000), designed by them and manufactured in the Philippines; and Sara, a less-expensive line of urns (P9,000 to P15,000) imported from India. Sara was in response to the hyperinflation of funeral expenses during the pandemic. Ms. Sy recalls urns sold at funeral homes for P60,000 for the most basic designs, while their imported urns could be sold at P10,000, with profit.

Ms. Ayala said, “We would get messages from funeral homes. Nasisira daw business nila (we’re ruining their business).” Ms. Sy said she had to change her name on Facebook because she was being harassed — by funeral homes, during a mass-death event.

Ms. Sy discussed the challenges they face in an industry ruled by tradition, legacy, name recall, and age: “People don’t know they have a choice,” she said, citing her own experiences.

Ms. Ayala, meanwhile, showed us some of the Samsara urns: there’s one shaped like a bomb, in marble; then one with a chic contrasting lid. Another has a lid with a sharp object (either a nail, or a sword; up to interpretation), but most charming of all is an urn made of limestone, carved to have grooves. The grooves fit fingers, almost as if holding a loved one again.

The urns use local materials, such as wood, nacreous shell, or rattan — in a way it’s celebrating Filipino craftsmanship from cradle to grave (urn). Ms. Ayala also pointed out that everything in the café is also made from local ingredients. Their beans are from Atok in Benguet, while the salts used for the excellent Artisanal Sea Salt Cream Latte (P240), come from Pangasinan, Guimaras, and Zambales.

“We have an abundance of beautiful things that we use as home decor. The way we see urns, we see them as someone’s final home. It’s more than just a container of ashes. It’s someone’s final resting place,” she said.

Of course it’s essentially a heavy vase, but Ms. Ayala told us about the design considerations. A cremated person weighing about 200 lbs. would yield ashes weighing about two to three kilograms — each urn then, has to be about 200 cubic inches to fit all of that.

COFFEE AND COFFINS (SORT OF)
The women recall that finding a space for the showroom took them a whole year. Landlords refused them because they first thought there would be dead bodies involved. When told that the urns would be empty, they were told that the business might invite bad luck into the building (they are located above a dive shop). Besides, “It’s not like we can invite people inside an urn showroom, and change their perspective about death,” said Ms. Ayala.

“We thought of something that’s more familiar, more welcoming, and more approachable,” she said.

The name Samsara comes from the Hindu belief of the cycle of death and rebirth — “What they want to do is escape that cycle,” said Ms. Ayala. “What we want to do with our brand is promote death positivity.”

Ms. Sy says, “Right now, we’re playing a slow game. We introduced the café to young people. In a way, the café introduces our urns also.”

The cyclical nature of Samsara is reflected in the café’s design: sails (suggestive of the journey to the afterlife) are arranged in concentric circles. Bulul guardians stand in some niches within the café, because there are almost no corners: there is therefore an air of softness and warmth all around. Ms. Ayala said that she wanted the place to look like a shrine, or a temple: a place of peace. As for the name of the café itself, it comes from how their friends didn’t believe that they combined the two businesses together (thus making it a “myth”).

Not to say they haven’t received flak: comments on social media joke about them using ashes as part of their recipes, or all of it being a part of a gimmick, but for them, what was important was a grieving customer shopping for a loved one’s urn saying, “Bili nga rin ako ng coffee (maybe I should get a coffee),” thus making that one customer’s day a little better.

They’ve recently hosted events, such as a botanical sculpting workshop, called “We Too Shall Wither,” and a Halloween film screening and portrait session. All of these events are under an umbrella theme: Memento Mori (Latin for “Remember you will die.”)

“It’s part of life. It’s acknowledging nature: of being born, and then, later on, dying,” said Ms. Ayala.

On the urns again, we mention that she calls them someone’s final home. They have to be beautiful, she says, because “It’s the thing that your relatives see when they visit you. It’s nice if what they see is something that would remind them of you.”

Myth is on the 4th floor of the BABS Bldg., 9304 Kamagong St., Makati. It’s open from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., except on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, when they open at noon. — Joseph L. Garcia