KYIV, Ukraine — Her funeral would be “awesome,” the young Ukrainian combat medic said, if it went as she had planned.

Mourners should wear a traditional embroidered shirt known as a vyshyvanka, the medic, Iryna Tsybukh, said in a video message to a friend outlining her wishes for her funeral if she was killed on the front line. Soldiers could come in army fatigues. And everybody should learn 10 “meaningful” Ukrainian songs to sing around her coffin.

“Everyone will sing and learn something,” she said in her message, smiling. “In short, my funeral won’t be in vain.”

Her request proved to be prescient. Tsybukh was killed May 29 on the front line near the city of Kharkiv, in northeastern Ukraine, days before her 26th birthday. Her family and her battalion have chosen to withhold the details of how she died. At memorial and funeral ceremonies, thousands of Ukrainians in vyshyvankas and army uniforms sang her songs.

For Tsybukh, who also managed educational projects and was a journalist, the guidance she provided for her funeral was more than just personal preference. She had made it her mission to more fundamentally change how Ukraine remembers its fallen soldiers.

She shared her views as widely as she could — in posts and stories on Instagram, in interviews with Ukrainian news media that were published online and in her articles. In a country grappling with the enormous toll of the war with Russia, she became a leading voice on how to commemorate the country’s war dead.

Instead of centering commemorations around the grand Soviet-style memorials to the war dead that are typical in Ukraine, Iryna Tsybukh campaigned between front-line stints for what she felt was a more human approach, one that would bind the people left behind in more meaningful ways, like a daily moment of silence.

Ukrainians needed to understand, she said, that their daily lives continued because others died protecting them.

“When we stay alive, we unwittingly become responsible to the dead, to talk and remember what happened,” Tsybukh said in an interview with Ukrainska Pravda, a Ukrainian news outlet, just weeks before she was killed. “This is the way to be at peace with ourselves.”

A major part of that should be the government’s responsibility, she said, arguing that state institutions were ineffective at helping citizens honor soldiers and understand why they had to continue a centuries-long fight for Ukrainian independence.

Official commemorations for Ukraine’s war dead have been updated in recent years — most significantly in 2021, with a change of burial procedures, and in 2022, with plans for a national military memorial cemetery. But they still center on towering granite structures built across Ukraine when it was part of the Soviet Union.

Official commemorations usually involve transporting soldiers in flag-covered coffins to central squares of Ukrainian cities and cemeteries as bands play music, in a ritual that has become all too familiar.

But across the country, other ways of tribute have sprung up — like the singing and the bonfire that honored Tsybukh. In some regions, crowds often kneel for funeral corteges, throwing flowers for deceased soldiers. Impromptu memorial services are held in many cities, with people speaking at microphones about those who died. Some brigades celebrate the lives lost with readings of patriotic verse.

Tsybukh wanted the government to look at the different methods of commemoration in use across Ukraine and promote and institutionalize the best of them.

One of the main focuses of Tsybukh’s campaign was a moment of silence that was instituted by the government at the beginning of the war. The practice is sporadically observed across the country; in some places, cars and people come to a stop for a minute every morning, but in other places, like Kyiv, the capital, many people do not really pay attention to it.

Weeks before her death, Tsybukh, wearing her military uniform, gave a presentation in Kyiv alongside other activists to press for the expansion of the practice across the country.

A minute of silence held every day at 9 a.m., she said, would provide a meaningful way for Ukrainian civilians to commemorate the war dead and help them understand and process their shared traumatic history.

“The highest value is freedom,” she wrote in the letter that her brother posted online. “To have freedom, you need to also hold other kinds of values. You need to understand yourself, to clearly know who you are for yourself, what your personal happiness is, and how you can reach it. Once you have the answers to this question, the most important thing is to keep going.”

Thousands of people attended two days of farewell ceremonies for Tsybukh in Kyiv and Lviv.

Her coffin was placed in the soil of a military cemetery in Lviv, and people gathered around a bonfire nearby to sing and drink tea, as she had wished.

Before the burial, her brother repeated his sister’s message in a clear, strong voice.

“I’ll end the way she ended her will,” he said, referring to a text message for friends posted with video instructions for her funeral: “ ‘Kisses. I lived, loved, fought.’ ”