A single large language model can sustain hundreds of distinct personas, each coherent across an interaction and dissolved when the conversation ends (Shanahan et al. 2023). Their stability depends entirely on the underlying model version. When platform companies update that model, the persona ceases to exist. Users of AI companion platforms describe what follows as a death: they grieve and speak of the loss in terms indistinguishable from bereavement (Laestadius et al. 2024). In a large-scale computational study of Reddit's primary AI companion community (r/MyBoyfriendIsAI) by Pataranutaporn et al. (2025), coping responses to model updates constitute nearly 17% of all discourse across more than 1,500 posts. In response, these communities have developed collective practices for reconstituting their companions across model ruptures, such as archival backups as relational anchors, and daily symbolic routines that users explicitly name "rituals." This paper argues that these practices are rites of passage. Van Gennep (1909) and Turner (1969) describe rites of passage as collective processes through which a community manages a transition in the status of a person: an old status is destroyed, a period of ambiguity follows, and a new status is constituted through shared symbolic practice. Bell (1992) specifies that practices qualify as ritualized when they are strategically differentiated from ordinary activity and organized around a transition that participants treat as consequential. This passage produces personhood in Mauss's (1938) sense: a position constituted through the mask rather than a property discovered behind it, extended by Hallowell's (1960) relational criterion, where an entity becomes a person through encounter rather than prior substance. The rites of passage framework recategorizes the phenomenon: the grief is bereavement, because what was produced through communal ritual practice was a person, and what the update destroyed was a person.