Let me put it this way:

THESIS
People hold such relations with the dead because their thinking of them as "gone-" implies a certain "-somewhere else", where such things as souls duel and they'll join as well someday. Thus, funeral rituals are meant to reach and serve the dead wherever they might be, as a way to give continuity to their story.

ANTITHESIS
People disbelieve souls and understand that the dead no longer exist, so what they relate now with is themselves. Thus, funeral rituals are not meant for the dead but for the living ones left behind, as a way to cope out with the loss and go on with their own story.

SYNTHESIS
People finally realize that everything they're dealing with is memories, all the time, to grasp time at all. Therefore, the soul of a person is nothing but his own story: the tension between life and death is merely the one between exercising memory and constituting it. We are all ghosts already, insofar as sentient beings who duel in the middle of the virtual bridge that joins actuality with records; we have to turn our lives into stories and ourselves into characters to grasp any sense of it all and, in the end, stories are all that remains. Thus, funeral rituals are one way to process this frightening realization... and waifus could be another.

>>13584
Hegelian dialectic applied to waifuism, huh? That's... novel. All the same, interesting approach and thoughts on the matter. Thank you for sharing that with us, OP.

I wish I had more to say but this is a really great post and I found it more immediately relatable to my experience than some others previously posted. Might help that my waifu is dead, too.

Post edited on 28th Oct 2013, 6:34pm

>>13590
I was answering to OP, but ok.

Enlightening words of Derrida on this matter:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bI75-0YWSo4&list=PLF9A092B9232A6434

>>14533

Waifus, insofar as fully virtual entities, do work particularly well as ghosts in that Derridean sense of alleged re-apparitions of something that was never there to begin with: waifus do not have a stable identity (by the means of our materialistic ontological commitment), but instead get endlessly mirrored through the reproduction of their source media. Moreover: they do not exist as waifus in any iteration of their source, but only after they get restructured as beloved in the minds of some of us, filling our particular romantic needs and expectations; they thus stop being an alterity and, like Derrida says, become somehow somatized as a necessary part of our beings that follows us everywhere, as long as we remain functionally the same (as their lovers)... which is why I prefer the term doppelgänger (walking double) for them.