Update | Singapore says final farewell to its founding father Lee Kuan Yew
Prime Minister joins tens of thousands in the city-state to pay tribute to his father, who 'lived and breathed' the country all his life
When Singapore's founding father Lee Kuan Yew was a 64-year-old prime minister in 1988, he declared: "Even from my sickbed, even if you are going to lower me into the grave and I feel something is going wrong, I will get up."
The remark was often joked about as evidence of Lee's difficulty letting go of power.
Watch: Singapore's final farewell to Lee Kuan Yew
But at his state funeral yesterday, when his eldest son and current Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong quoted it, the words took on a different tenor. The promise encapsulated an obsessive sense of responsibility that mourning Singaporeans might have taken for granted but now realised was unusual in politics.
Lee Kuan Yew "lived and breathed Singapore all of his life", the prime minister said in his eulogy.