Date posted: December 23, 2024

Written by: Paige Gavin, Avery Nennmann, and Sarah Wagner 

“The holidays can be incredibly difficult for those who are grieving,” said Rima Samman-Whitaker, Co-founder of Rami’s Heart. “Being surrounded by others who understand and have suffered similar losses offers a unique comfort and reminds us that we are not alone in our grief. This event is our way of providing hope and solidarity as we enter the holiday season.”

For this holiday season, on Saturday, November 23, 2024, RIM researchers Avery Nennmann, Paige Gavin, and Sarah Wagner ventured back up to New Jersey for the fourth annual Rami’s Heart COVID Memorial Holiday Bazaar. It was our third trip to NJ this year to attend and support events hosted by Rami’s Heart. (We traveled to Wall, NJ for the fourth annual lighting ceremony in March and again to Belmar Beach for the fourth annual “Walk to Remember” in April.)

But this was our first time attending Rami’s Heart’s holiday bazaar.

As we know, the holiday season is an important time of year for anniversaries, remembrances, and rituals, and so we volunteered to help with the holiday bazaar by making gift baskets for the raffle and serving food to the public attendees.

After much deliberation on the theme of our gift baskets, we chose science education for the children, ages 4-7 years old. In these baskets were plush animals, science games and toys, candy, and books on wildlife. This theme we hoped would inspire young children to be interested in science and to be curious about the world around them. 

There were over 120 gift baskets donated for this event, and they varied in their theme and composition. Of particular interest to us were the baskets designed and assembled in the spirit of a loved one lost to COVID-19. Daughters, sons, sisters, brothers, and friends all donated pieces of their memory of a loved one to be bundled in a basket that would then be passed along to another person for their enjoyment and remembrance.

These well-designed gift baskets are material representations of the memory of a loved one, much in the likeness of the AIDS Quilt, where objects and symbols composed of fabric and string were sewn together to echo a loved one’s spirit.

What is intriguing about these baskets—what stands apart from other forms of memorialization—is that they break away from the default process of necronominalism, in which the names of the deceased are the principal object and conduit of memory-making.

“… a proliferation of the names of the dead or, more precisely, a moral imperative to hold on to them in public settings: to read them from books and lists; to inscribe them in stone or steel; to trace them on paper; to treat them as if they were actual remains. Ours is the age of necronominalism…”

– Thomas Laqueur, The Work of the Dead, p. 414.

Yet, these baskets have become a necromemoria, in which the personality, traits, and hobbies of a person have been represented into a material bundle of items.

Among these baskets of curated mementos and signifiers meant to pass into new hands, we’re reminded of Joshua Bell’s writing on “bundles,” a term he applies to collections of museum artifacts. He explains that “individual objects are composed of materials, knowledge, and social relationships. Every object is the product of various scales of collecting materials, and processes of making, whether conceived of as a bundle of semiotic properties (Keane 2005), networks (Latour 2005), relations (Strathern 1999), an assemblage (Bennett 2010, Deleuze & Guattari 2004), or meshwork (Ingold 2011, 2012).”

Placed beside each basket in the high school gymnasium, descriptions penned by their donors lovingly recalled the materials, knowledge, and social relations that represent the absent:

• “Rami loved all things, Snoopy, his family, and Cracker Barrel, especially around the holiday.”
• “Andrew was a hard-working business owner, and he also believed in giving back to his community.”
• “Barbara loved to be all together around the table for the Holidays. She would plan weeks before the menu with everyone’s favorites. . . . Her turkey soup, second to none!”

We were honored to take part in the day and glimpse the communitas of this community, born from grief as well as laughter, humor, kindness, warmth, and, above all, a common sense of purpose—to support one another through yet another holiday without their loved ones.