Flowers for the Dead Since flowers symbolize new life, it may seem inappropriate to have them at funerals. Yet people in many cultures top coffins or caskets with wreaths and garlands and put blossoms on the graves of them 【B1】______ This custom is part of a widespread, long-lived pattern. Edwin Daniel Wolff speculated that floral tributes to the dead are an outgrowth of the grave goods of ancient【B2】______ . In cultures that firmly believed in an 【B3】______ , and believed further that the departed could enter that afterlife only 【B4】______ they took with them indications of their worldly status, it was a necessity to bury the dead with material goods: hence the wives and animals that were killed to accompany 【B5】______ rulers, the riches 【B6】______ with Egyptian pharaohs, and the coins that Europeans used to place on the departed person's eyes as payment for the Stygian ferryman. In time, as economy modified tradition, the actual 【B7】______ goods were replaced 【B8】______ symbolic representations. In China, for example, gold and silver paper became a stand-in 【B9】______ real money. Eventually even the symbolic significance became obscured. Thus, Wolff said, flowers may be the 【B10】______ step in 'three well-marked stages of offerings to the dead: the actual object, its substitute in various forms, and -- finally -- mere tributes of respect.' 【B1】______