The Cremation Flower - Mourning Sirimongol Luksiripat (Patreon)

I’m spinning a paper flower, around and around, between my fingertips. The flower is off-white and a spire sticks up along the back of it, like a spike, twice the length of the black stem. At the base, behind the flower, is a yellow candle and a short incense stick – this pairing is universal in temple offerings, making this flower a kind of “all in one” prayer piece. I spin it in my fingers, just staring at it. It’s beautifully constructed, requiring dexterity of fingers and has both a sturdiness that comes from how tightly the stem is twisted, and yet a delicateness in the “puffed” flower itself. Whatever hands coiled it into being have done so thousands of times.

The atonal, wailing sound of Ram Muay music starts playing over the loud speakers and I look up. There are people seated in front of me, all in black except for two young men in crisp, almost shockingly-white shirts. The hall is almost all white as well, with gold decoration along the tops of shrines. There’s a steep staircase with a red carpet leading up to a small area where the coffin is perched, intricate and gold. At the base of the stairs is an open area, between some pillars, where two legends have appeared in Muay Thai shorts, monkols and gloves to perform a special Ram Muay. The man in blue is Sagat Petchyindee, who won “best Ram Muay” for 11 years running. He has a truly beautiful Ram Muay and he knows it. He performs it with focus and care, hitting each movement so that the back row can see each turn of his glove. Pudpadnoi is in red; his Ram Muay is beautiful, too, but what strikes me more is how he finishes first (his is shorter than Sagat’s) and starts rolling his ankles and stretching his arms, messing with his shorts in exactly the way a fighter would to wait out his opponent. This strikes me because I know that this part is performance, just as much as a Ram Muay is performance, but by doing it here he’s showing how it’s inseparable from the ceremony of the dance. Like how between the rounds, sitting in your corner, you’re still performing for the judges. From where I’m sitting, I can’t always see the two men. They’re obscured by the massive white pillars; they’re obscured by the audience standing up and moving around to take video and photos. I don’t crane my neck or shift in my seat, I just let them be eclipsed by these black backs, emerging over and over again between these white trunks in snippets of an extended arm, or a twisting body. The two men stand and have their monkols removed by two incredibly powerful, senior men of Muay Thai. As they begin their demonstration fight, a special performance to honor the life of the Muay Thai legend at the top of the stairs, inside that gold box, I can’t see much of their movements because so many people are now standing. But I can hear them and I fix my eyes on the gold box at the top of the red staircase. Their “oi!” vocalizations and the sound of their gloves hitting each other’s skin becomes a kind of soundtrack that makes the movements secondary. My mind makes up for it. Just as hearing that wailing sound of the Ram Muay music, my mind already starts playing a dance. I smell the lineament oil and vaseline, even though there is none here. I see that box at the top of the stairs and I see Sirimonkol in my mind, I hear his soft “s” in how he spoke; I see his face as he would break into laughter, the way he seemed to always turn his face up or away to smile.

I’m here to honor a man I met only twice. But in those short encounters, maybe totaling a few hours, I was impacted by him. He felt old, the way he stood quietly and spoke softly, a slight hunch in his shoulders that looked like a stooping of age when he stood still and suddenly became a boxer’s posture when he put his fists up and started to move. As he sat quietly it seemed as though he wasn’t paying attention, kind of lost in a space of his own, but then he’d suddenly laugh at something that was said – a complete “throw away line” that he found amusing, which proved he was always listening closely. He seemed to find me really funny, which endeared him even further to me because my humor (in Thai) is often very subtle. What endeared me to him most was how, the first time we met, General Tunwakom had told Sirimonkol to grab me in the clinch in order to instruct some kind of move. Sirimonkol, who was 71 years old, put his hand reasonably softly on my neck to create a position and I locked my hand back on his with the sincerity with which I’d grab a training partner. Upon feeling this grip, the fighter inside Sirimonkol woke up and he firmed his grip, grappled a few moves and ultimately threw me on the ground within 10 seconds or so. He did so with joy; he was meeting me in a way that’s as close to a universal “secret handshake” is it gets between Muay Thai fighters. And his quiet disposition wasn’t in contrast to that power and strength, it was part of the structure. Like how the delicate paper of the flower makes the flower, but the twisted strength of the stem is also required to make it a thing.

Everyone stood and I shuffled sideways to the aisle, allowing an elderly couple to pass in front of me with a slight nod of my head before falling in line behind them. The whole procession of the entire audience, each person holding a flower in their hand, walked slowly up the staircase. I could only see black backs as I ascended the stairs. At the top, each person placed their paper flower under the casket and filed off to the left, back down another staircase, while monks chanted. Some of the men knocked three times on the side of the box with the same hand that held the flower, before laying it underneath. To the left was a beautiful wreath of flowers with Sirimonkol’s young face, body posed as a fighter, at the center. It’s the same portrait that he’d handed my husband a print of in our second meeting. In the photo, he’s handsome and young; the print itself is blown out and too light, a copy of a copy of a print in an old newspaper, probably.

As we descended in order down the stairs we were given a small printed book full of photos and Sirimonkol’s life history, as well as a small flashlight, “to light your way in life.” Kevin and I looked through this book together, turning the pages slowly to take in a curated version of this incredible man’s life. We’d barely made it through 10 pages when we were invited to go up the stairs again and put more paper flowers under the box as it entered the crematorium. Walking up those stairs again, through the space where we’d been before and just maybe 20 feet farther back, the white and gold box was now cradled by a beautiful, red flame. The procession of Muay Thai authorities, legends, and friends tossed more flowers into the flames at the base of the box. We provided the tinder for this final transformation, we provide silent prayers and words to a man whose life we’re celebrating. It wasn’t until we got back down the stairs again and I started flipping through the 3rd volume of a set of maybe 5 scrapbooks that I began to mourn. These volumes were pages and pages of newspaper clippings – from the 70s and onward – which must have been collected and carefully compiled by Sirimonkol and his family. I turned each page and my eyes sought out dates, names, opponents and written accounts of his fights in these small clippings. My eyes teared up and blurred all the images in front of me as I thought to myself that this man’s whole life was on these pages. I have a scrapbook like this. One. I haven’t touched it in over a year and there are tons of clippings that are in a folder, waiting to be glued into the book. It was beautiful to me, but it was also sad, in the way that the two dates on a headstone, separated only by a dash is sad. An entire lifetime is expressed by a dash. These books are as much the man Sirimonkol was as my very few memories of him are – just snapshots; and there will be no more of them. I cried not because of something personal, but because of how impersonal an imprint is. I’m grateful to have met him. I’m grateful for these memories of him, which only mean something if they’re a celebration.  

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ARTICLES - Patreon Magazine

• Patron Only Articles - These articles are written specially for my patrons and are my attempts to expand as a writer. They are full of richer descriptions, and take on themes not always talked about in the experience of being a fighter. At least one is published a month, if not two.

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