The proposed paper will explore the impact of death in several ancient cultures from the perspective of written sources of each of these cultures. The documents in question could be collectively called "letters to the dead". Egyptologists used this term for the first time for the type of written communications addressed to the dead relatives in Ancient Egypt. These sources often describe the aftermaths of the departure of a person from the realm of the living, revealing information about social relations, customs, rituals, beliefs, and laws of Ancient Egypt. Ancient Egyptian civilization was not the only one to produce this type of texts. Ancient Chinese people deposited together with the dead body, special formal letters (告地書; gàodìshū) containing information on the departing person for the officials in the Underworld. The dead, or rather their corpses, were also used by the Ancient Greeks and Romans (among other Mediterranean cultures) to transmit the message to the other side (i.a. tabulae defixiones). What is important here is the fact that these documents are frequently connected with the body of the deceased. Therefore the questions asked here would be: on the one side what is the meaning of the dead body for those cultures and how according to their beliefs the corpse take part in this communication between the realms, while from the other side how the living people of the past have dealt with the loss of the loved ones. The discussion will be completed with a few examples of contemporary customs resembling the ancient ones.