Rituals surrounding death are to-day in a reconstruction process, in consequence of the transformations in the social regulations of death passing from confessional and community rules to market ones. This reconstruction emerges as evidence in new secular forms of rituals, on the one hand, and in a redefinition of ritual functions, on the other. After having stressed the importance of anthropological general functions of rituals, the paper identifies and qualifies some contemporary transformations of death rituals, distributing them in three structural levels: the act of dying, the disposal of remains and the after-life imaginary. How the act of grieving for the lost of a life does now come to the symbolic order, and what do mean the new links to be connected with the human community?