“Don’t Give Us Death like This!” Commemorating Death in the Age of COVID-19

Deberry-Spence, B.; Trujillo-Torres, L.

This research honors the lives of COVID-19 victims and gives voice to the commemorations their families share. The COVID-19 pandemic is becoming one of the most destructive forces experienced by humanity in the last 100 years. Commemoration is a way that consumers honor and memorialize the dead and a response by a society experiencing losses. Through an investigation of social and news media materials, we extend previous research on post-traumatic commemoration by examining consumer commemoration in the midst of a global pandemic. The data show commemorations of ante-, peri-, and postmortem memories prominently feature disruptions that implicate a “good death,” ritual sensemaking, and public death recognition. The findings also uncover that digital technologies are both a subject of consumer death memories and a means of managing COVID-19 related disruptions. Our work contributes to greater understanding of death and consumer culture. © 2021 Association for Consumer Research. All rights reserved.