By Sarah Wagner
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“We are talking about how we carry so many people with us wherever we go, how even simple living, these unearned moments, are a tribute to the dead.”
– Ada Limón, “Forsythia”
March 28, 2026: In the earnest, warm light of an early spring evening, Rami’s Heart COVID-19 Memorial once again gathered its own to remember their loved ones. Shades of yellow—hearts, shells, stones, candles, ribbons, and flowers—brought the space to life despite (or maybe because of) the setting sun. This year Paige Gavin and I had the honor of joining Rima Samman-Whitaker and the Rami’s Heart community for the occasion, and I write this dispatch with the evening’s sights and sounds still fresh in my mind. The essay combines photos from before and after the ceremony with captions drawn from the different speeches, as well as poetry that I stumbled on in the days since. I’ll start with a collage of photos and two poems that seem especially fitting.
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Forsythia et al.
For this sixth annual lighting ceremony, Rima urged attendees to bring flowers. And so, gradually, as people arrived, so too did their floral tributes: a vase nested in the dark mulch, its bouquet brimming with shades of bright and pale yellow, pink, and green; clusters of canary-yellow roses tied to a memorial bench; a single stem of gerbera daisy resting atop a heart-shaped stone; florets of golden-yellow ranunculus (Persian Buttercups), tucked between names.
And forsythia, at the entrance and exit, just then in brilliant yellow bloom.
To my delight, I found that two of my favorite poets have written about forsythia:
It caught my eye a while ago, lit up
Source: Poetry (April 1995)
against the gloom of the woods
in the corner of a wild field,
the pulsing color of caution.
And now that I have spent a little time
on this stone wall watching its fire
flare out of the earth
I begin to think about the long chronicle of forsythia,
how these same flowers have blazed
through the centuries,
roused from the ground by the churning of spring.
I would rather not look around the next
corner of the year to see how this will die,
its lights going out,
its bare, arcing branches
waving like whips in the bitter wind.
So I sit facing the past,
letting my feet dangle over the wall,
beating time against stone with my heels
as the long gray clouds roll over me.
Remember how Arnold by the Channel
thought of Sophocles who must have heard
the same shore-sounds long ago,
walking by the edge of the Aegean?
Well, I am holding in the palm of my thoughts
all the others who once were stopped,
like me, by this brightness,
this sulfuric cry for help:
women in tunics, women gathered by a well,
men in feathers, men swimming by a river,
all speaking languages I will never know,
saying the different words for its color
as I feel the syllables of yellow form in my mouth
and hear the sound of yellow fill the morning air.
At the cabin in Snug Hollow near McSwain Branch creek, just spring, all the animals are out, and my beloved and I are lying in bed in a soft silence. We are talking about how we carry so many people with us wherever we go, how even simple living, these unearned moments, are a tribute to the dead. We are both expecting to hear an owl as the night deepens. All afternoon, from the porch, we watched an Eastern towhee furiously build her nest in the untamed forsythia with its yellow spilling out into the horizon. I told him that the way I remember the name forsythia is that when my stepmother, Cynthia, was dying, that last week, she said lucidly, but mysteriously, More yellow. And I thought yes, more yellow and nodded because I agreed. Of course, more yellow. And so now in my head, when I see that yellow tangle, I say, For Cynthia, for Cynthia, forsythia, forsythia, more yellow. It is night now. And the owl never comes, only more of night and what repeats in the night.
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Scenes from the ceremony: Photo essay
(The captions and quotations that accompany the images are from the ceremony’s speakers: Teresa Dimezza; Dr. Raynard E. Washington; Joann Burney; Sean Burney; and Rima Samman-Whitaker.)
“[COVID] brought a lot of loss and disruption and uncertainty and quarantines and homeschooling and all kinds of home projects and just complete chaos in our lives. And while time has moved forward, the impact of that time certainly hasn’t. In New Jersey alone, we lost more than 35,000 residents to this virus, and while that’s a number, each one of those numbers counts to life, a story, a family that’s forever been changed. . . . So tonight is about honoring those individuals, about saying their names in our hearts, holding space for their stories, and recognizing that though they’re not here with us, the love that we share for them still is here.”
– Dr. Raynard E. Washington, Commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Health
To the families I remember with you all this evening, to those that we lost, I honor you all this evening and to all gathered here, may we leave this place, not just with heavy hearts and remembrance of those that have been lost, but with a renewed sense of purpose to continue to act to make health possible for all of our neighbors here in New Jersey.” – Dr. Washington
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“We also gather in a moment when there are voices who would rather we forget, who would have us move on without reflection and replace our very real, lived experiences with misinformation. But we can’t, and New Jersey won’t. Public health is based depends on trust and on truth and our willingness to learn from what we’ve endured together as communities. Remembering is not about looking backwards. It’s about honoring lives by doing better as we move forward.” – Dr. Washington
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“But in the six years, each and every year, something happens, something brings us hope, something shows us that there’s still good things out there, like Sean and Joan who gave us the space, like Governor Mikie Sherrill and Dr. Washington for recognizing our grief, the board members that meet with us every month and help us plan everything out, and we all do it on our own time.” – Rima Samman-Whitaker, Founder of Rami’s Heart COVID-19 Memorial
“So it’s another year that we go on grieving as the world moves on. The reality is we’ll never move on from our grief, but we’ll ever, will forever carry their love and their light. So tonight, when we light those candles, just know that we carry their light. And although grief may not be a great thing, it is a part of us. It is a part of who we are now, and it is up to us to keep them in our memory and our lives.”
– Rima Samman-Whitaker, sister of Rami Samman
