Can you hear a dirge anyplace but a funeral?
Sadness at the loss of someone's life often is expressed musically in a funeral dirge, a rather melancholy song made to relate to grief and mourning. Any sorrowful sound or composition can be dirge-like, if it brings to mind a lament for something that's gone away.
From George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss:
The days of chivalry are not gone, notwithstanding Burke's grand dirge over them; they live still in that far-off worship paid by many a youth and man to the woman of whom he never dreams that he shall touch so much as her little finger or the hem of her robe.