Funeral Rites, rituals and war memorials. Sense and Meaning

Rituals are symbolic activities that help us to express our deepest thoughts and feelings about life's most important events. The funeral ritual has a public, traditional and symbolic mean of expressing our beliefs, thoughts and feelings about the death of someone loved. The funeral ceremony helps us to acknowledge the reality of the death, gives testimony to the life of the dead, provides support to mourners and offers hope for the living.

Funeral rituals have the function of make people acknowledge the reality of the death. When someone we love dies, we use to accept the reality and the finality of the death to move forward with our grief. Funeral ceremonies can serve as points of departure to understand it.

Remember the person who died is another function of funeral rituals. To heal in grief, we must provide a natural time and place for us to think about the moments we shared with the person who died. The funeral invites us to focus on our past relationship with that one, single person and to share those memories with others.

Furthermore when someone we love dies, we naturally question the meaning of life and death, the sense of our existence. To heal in grief, we must explore these types of questions. In fact, we must first ask these "why" questions to decide why we should go on living. This doesn’t mean we must find answers, only that we need the opportunity to think. The funeral reinforces also one central fact of our existence: we will die. Like living, dying is a natural and unavoidable process.

These rituals can be related to war memorials, that are buildings, monuments, statues or other edifices to celebrate a war or victory or to commemorate those who died or were injured in a war.

War memorials can differ significantly in type and composition. Many war memorials often take the form of a traditional monument or statue, while others consist of buildings, often containing a museum. War memorials often serve as a meeting place for commemorative services.