At the end of Dovzhenko’s 1930 film, a grieving father, Opanas, rejects a religious funeral for Vasyl, his murdered son. Instead, he calls upon the community to “sing new songs for a new life.” Secularism stands in triumph, penetrating almost every area of our lives, narrowed public displays of religious expression to strange circumscribed outbursts of joy and despair. Yet in death, especially in its final concrete form of animal desiccation, the symbolic meaning expressed as the final act and culmination of life, continues to be outsourced to religious authorities who are wholly unsuited to speak about our secular lives. It is a strange disconnect, a nod to tradition. It lacks a genuineness, the words conveyed seemed inauthentic. A secular body, stolen at the last minute and whisked inside the iron grasp of church to the dubious claim “only we have hallowed, consecrated grounds; only here has a body returned to its rightful place.” A modern man asserts his faith less from a sense of conviction but as a bandaid covering his fear of dying. It’s not enough to simply reject this religious formalism, to insist on a secular funeral which more often than not is simply families grieving in private. We have to create new traditions, a true secular funeral, one endorsed in the full light of public display, new songs for a new life.