This study presents the lived memory work of Israeli bereaved parents who preserve the bedrooms of their children—fallen soldiers—intact after their deaths. Ethnographic semi-structured interviews and participant observation in the rooms point to an assemblage of interwoven practices that sustain the presence of the dead in the family lifeworld. Enactment of past habitual embodied movement, person-object interaction, and familial roles within the domestic architecture that housed the deceased sustain virtual presence. Removal from view of military objects signifying death, and modulated incorporation of new life in the room forestall cracks in virtuality of presence and temporal absencing, ushering the dead into familial futures. Reconceptualizing livedmemory as the manipulation of temporal stasis and continuity to (re)generate presence rather than represent/commemorate absence and loss, raises questions regarding the dialectical relations between lived memory and public commemoration and the salutary potential of continuing bonds with loved ones.
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