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

Benét DeBerry-Spence and Lez Trujillo-Torres

Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2022, vol. 7, issue 1, 27 - 35

Abstract: 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.

Date: 2022
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