Undeterred by the rain, people lining up along the route waved flags and cheered "We love you! Two navy patrol vessels conducted a ceremonial sailpast at sea off Marina Barrage and sounded three prolonged horn blasts as the procession passed by. With the state flag in half-mast, they flew a black flag used for mourning with signal flags representing the letters L, K and Y. As the procession passed the Padang, the ships sounded three prolonged horn blasts of 10 seconds each.
Early Sunday morning, members of the public began lining along the procession route which also passed through Shenton Way, Tanjong Pagar, Bukit Merah, Queenstown and Commonwealth to get a good spot to bid their final farewell to Mr Lee. Along the route, crowds continued to chant Mr Lee's name. More than 1. Despite a heavy downpour across the island, people still turned up at various spots along the procession route. Getting a bit wet is nothing compared to what Mr Lee has done for us," said Tina, a year-old business owner, who was at Dover with her sister Agnes Ang, Senior research engineer Krishnamoorthy Baskaran, 42, had similar sentiments.
He said: "It's not a big matter that it's going to rain. Mr Lee's contribution was so much more than that. I wasn't able to go the the Parliament House so this is the least I could do for him. Mr Krishnamoorthy was sitting on a mat by the side of Clementi Road with his family of four. He said he met Mr Lee once, at a garden party at the Istana in It was the first time I've seen him up so close. I was very touched and I thanked him for what he's done for our country.
Real estate agent Joanne Lee, 35, had been waiting with her friend since 6. She said: "I thought there would be a lot of people so we wanted to come early to get a good spot to give Mr Lee a send-off. He said: "I went to Parliament House on Thursday and waited six hours in line. I'm here again to see Mr Lee off. This is the final send-off. I had to come. Grassroots networks were giving out state flags to their volunteers across the island to wave along the procession route.
One of them, Ms Archna Sharma, 37, who was at City Hall, said: "We want to be united as one people and use the flag as our identity to symbolise the Singapore spirit. The national media was invited to a press conference at the Istana by Senior Minister Lee.
I went as editor of the Streats daily. It was a small group. We assembled in a room and sat waiting in a row of chairs, line abreast. TV crews and photographers readied their equipment. Across from us was a wall with windows opening to a corridor, which Mr Lee would enter from. As we chatted about the purpose of the presscon, I saw a shadow fall across the curtain of the window furthest to the left. It progressed from window to window.
It was not Mr. Lee, I told myself. It seemed more like a shadow of a stooped person, looking, from where I sat, as though bent through disability or distraction. It could not be that of the tall, commanding and sometimes pugnacious Lee I had come to expect, having covered several events featuring him over the years as a journalist. Then something remarkable happened. As I watched it pass the last windows, the shadow straightened.
Mr Lee came through the door, eyes gleaming, a slight smile on his lips, upright and striding. He sat. Mics were checked. And we began. He was concerned. He was angry. Mr Lee, who had faced his share of potential disasters, described SARS as "more serious than other crises". A few days earlier, Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong had taken the extraordinary step of writing a letter to the public appealing to people to heed the advice of the authorities and not put others in danger through inconsiderate behaviour.
There were a few instances of people who fell sick, but went about their business instead of seeing their doctor to determine if they had this highly contagious disease.
Mr Goh's letter mentioned the case of a family of eight whose relative worked in the Pasir Panjang Wholesale Centre where two people contracted SARS and one died coming down with fever. They saw a General Practitioner, but instead of waiting for the special ambulance, took off the masks he had given them and went to a nearby food centre.
I had taken the unusual decision to carry the entire letter on the front page of my tabloid newspaper. Looking grim, Mr Lee referred to the family. He warned that all the measures put in place to stem the spread of SARS would be negated by irresponsible behaviour. Later, the family would give their reasons why they did not stay put.
Tracking and isolating individuals while trying to determine if they had SARS was already difficult, inconveniencing many and hurting livelihoods.
But far worse was in store, including death, if people refused to listen to the health officials. He was in full Lee lecture mode. Stern voice. Laser eyes. Expressive gestures. The Singapore he had invested so much of himself in was threatened by a new and unexpected danger on a national level and he was doing what he had been doing his adult life, whether as Prime Minister or as Senior Minister: face it head on and rally the nation to overcome it.
Then he dropped a bombshell. A few days later, he received a call from her doctor, who asked: "Is your wife with you? Mr Lee said that patient had been in the same room as his wife, with only a curtain separating them.
Madam Kwa had to be quarantined and her temperature checked regularly for a prescribed period before she could be considered out of the woods. As he described this, the thought that she could so easily have been lost must have gripped him. He looked at us. Stopped talking. His eyes teared. He looked down at his hands. No one spoke. Pens stopped writing. We averted our eyes.
Looked hard at our notebooks. He wiped his face and cleared his throat. We continued. He moved back to the national picture. The interview was published.
But no one mentioned Mr Lee's moment of anguish. Nothing was the same for me again. Up to that point, my impression of him was of a hard man with a single-minded devotion to the survival and success of Singapore and a knuckle-duster approach to politics. There had been nothing to endear him to me. But I had benefited from his achievements in unexpected ways.
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