Mortician Frank Malabed is Philippines' embalmer to the famous
Mortician Frank Malabed has handled the bodies of many of the Philippines' famous
When dictator Ferdinand Marcos and a host of other famous Philippine figures met their maker, they also met Frank Malabed.
An assassinated democracy hero, a soft-porn star, high-profile socialites and political statesmen are others to have been sent to the grave by the country's most prominent and, arguably, passionate mortician.
"I make people beautiful even in death," said Malabed, a bespectacled 62-year-old grandfather with a sparse walrus moustache, speaking at his home office in a working-class Manila neighbourhood.
"Embalming is either 100 per cent or zero. It cannot be 99 per cent. If you botch the job you cannot tell the family you're going to replace the body."
Malabed dreamed as a child of becoming an engineer, but his father was a mortician and his teenage years were spent learning the art of caring for the dead.
He tagged along in the 1960s when his father went to work each day at Clark, a then-huge US air base in the Philippines which played a key role in the Vietnam War. As thousands of dead US soldiers were brought back from Vietnam to be prepared for their journey home, "We had 30 to 40 casualties a day," Malabed said.
Malabed later married the daughter of a family that ran a chain of provincial mortuaries, and found life caring for the dead was very comfortable.