Sofia Baldan 4ALS

What is a funeral rite, a ritual and a memorial?
What is its meaning?

Rituals are symbolic activities that help us express our deepest thoughts, feelings and emotions about the most important events of our life.
The funeral ritual, too, is a public, traditional and symbolic means of expressing our beliefs, thoughts and feelings about the death of someone we loved. It helps us acknowledge the reality of the death. Funerals teach us that someone we loved is now dead, even if up until the funeral we may have denied it. They force us to concentrate on the death and our feelings about it. The funeral encourages us to think about the moments we shared with the person who died, it invites us to focus on our past relationship with that person and to share our memories with others. Thus the funeral helps us search for meaning in the life and death of the person who died as well as in our own lives. The very fact of a funeral demonstrates that death is important to us. There is also another way to keep dead people alive in our memory: the war memorials. A war memorial is a building, monument, statue or other edifice to celebrate a war or victory, or to commemorate those who died or were injured in a war.
During the Great War, many nations saw massive devastation and loss of life. In the west, and in response to the victory there obtained, most of the cities in the countries involved in the conflict erected memorials.
Memorials to the World War I are varied: there could be official and private memorials. And they could be find in very different places.In the United Kingdom the scale of the loss of those serving with the military during the Great War resulted in the fact that there are very few towns or villages which do not have some sort of public memorial to commemorate people who died in the First World War. In some cases the memorials also commemorate those people who served and returned from the war.
World War I memorials commemorate the events of World War I. They include civic memorials, larger national monuments, war cemeteries, private memorials and a range of utilitarian designs such as halls and parks.
In conclusion memorials and funerals are two ways to preserve the memory and express people’s feelings about important events. They create a connection between who died and who is alive.