Most funeral liturgies work by consolation. The Byzantine burial service begins by refusing it. The hymns attributed to John of Damascus, which form the spine of the rite, ask what earthly thing remains untroubled, describe the body as it will be in the grave, and address the dead person directly about the silence that has replaced their voice. They are sung, not read, and they are sung to the congregation's faces with the coffin open in front of them.
Only after that does the service turn. The same hymns move to the prayer that runs through the whole of the rite, that the departed be given rest in a place of light, a place of green pasture, a place of refreshment, where there is no pain, no sorrow and no sighing. The order matters: the Orthodox rite gets the grief said out loud first, and treats the hope as something set against a real loss rather than as a way of avoiding naming it.
The service ends with the farewell, when the mourners come forward in turn to the open coffin to give the last kiss, to the icon or cross laid on the body. Then the priest sings "Memory eternal", and the congregation takes it up. The phrase is not a wish that the dead be remembered by the living, which is how it is often heard; it is a prayer that they be held in the memory of God, which in this tradition is what it means to continue to exist.