A Vietnamese funeral does not finish the business of a death. It opens it. What the sequence is for is the conversion of a dead relative into an ancestor, a status that has to be built up over years by repeated attention, and the funeral is the first and largest of those attentions rather than a conclusion.
The immediate rites are dense. The body is washed and dressed and a grain of rice is placed in the mouth. The family puts on white, the coarseness of the cloth and the shape of the headband varying by relationship to the dead, an ordering inherited from the Chinese mourning grades. The coffin is kept and watched at home with an altar in front of it carrying incense, offerings, a photograph and the tablet that will hold the dead person's place afterwards. Paper goods may be burnt. The procession to the burial ground is not quiet: it has music, and it is meant to be seen and heard by the neighbourhood, because a funeral is also a statement of how well a family has done by its dead.
Then the returns begin. A rite at forty-nine days, another at a hundred, the formal ending of mourning after a period set by closeness of kin, and from then on the death anniversary, the gio, kept every year at the family altar with a meal to which the dead person is invited. The gio is the one that lasts. Households keep them for grandparents and great-grandparents, and the sequence of them is the working calendar of a Vietnamese family's religious life.