Over the past several years, Rituals in the Making has worked closely with a range of organizations and individual advocates dedicated to honoring the memory of lives lost to COVID and supporting those who survived them. Our team has benefitted enormously from those partnerships, and we wish to call your attention to the remarkable work of three of our closest collaborators:
Rami’s Heart COVID-19 Memorial
Founded by Rima Samman-Whitaker and Travis Whitaker, Rami’s Heart is the first permanent national COVID memorial in the United States. Rami’s Heart began as an improvised site of remembrance on the beach in Belmar, NJ and then, after rapid growth guided by Rima’s ingenuity and hard work, evolved to its forever home on a farm in Wall, NJ. Thousands are memorialized there and Rima has become a worldwide advocate for the Covid bereaved. We’ve been honored to take part in many of their community events since 2022, including several annual lighting ceremonies.
See, for example, the photo essay “Dispatch” from March 2026: “March 2026 – Steeped in the Yellows of Early Spring: Rami’s Heart COVID-19 Memorial Sixth Annual Lighting Ceremony.”
Rima Samman-Whitaker recently published a book about her experience of losing her brother Rami to COVID: Still Grieving: How The Pandemic Changed The Way We Mourn.
WhoWeLost.org and the Kentucky COVID Memorial
Now a full-fledged and essential member of the Rituals in the Making team, Martha Greenwald founded WhoWeLost.org in 2021 to provide a “sheltering space” for the COVID bereaved to write and share their stories to honor those they’d lost. The site never allows for comments or judgments and serves as a refuge from the toxicity of social media.
In 2023, Martha edited Who We Lost: A Portable COVID Memorial. The anthology, based on the website, contains narratives by the bereaved and health care professionals, and also includes extensive writing prompts to help anyone write their own remembrances.
That same year she also introduced us to sculptor Amanda Matthews, the creator of the Kentucky COVID Memorial, and who now serves as an advisor to our project.
In America: Remember
As our longest-standing partnership, Rituals in the Making has been working with Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg on the In America memorial series since November 2020. You can read more about Suzanne, her public art installations, and our ongoing collaboration here: https://ritualsinthemaking.org/in-america-remember/.