Tanner Chaille: The way in which we operate is defined in large part by our memories. Memory is a core component of the human identity. In this show, we hope to explore the nuances of this fundamental aspect of our brains. These conversations aimed to illustrate the strengths, weaknesses and mysteries surrounding remembering and forgetting. I’m Tanner Chaille. And I’m Isabel Nieves. And this is “Remembering and Forgetting”, a podcast by Themester.

Tanner Chaille: It may be hard for many of us to admit it, but it’s undeniable. The morbid and the macabre fascinate us. If not, Egyptian mummies and the ruins of Pompei would not occupy such as space in our understandings of history. It is because of the death within these spaces and others and not in spite of it that we find ourselves revisiting them again and again. Professor Robert Dobler is no stranger to this concept. He’s done a variety of research on this fascinating topic called dark tourism. In addition to the presence and significance of shrines and memorials in all their diverse forms. It turns out that the ways in which we grieve and commemorate on both personal and institutional levels can inform quite a lot about our culture. I sat down to talk with him about his work and his upcoming course on these very topics.

Tanner Chaille: I’m sitting here in the studio with Robert Dobler who is a professor of folklore here at IU, correct? Yes. Professor of folklore, and we’re going to have a conversation about the existence of shrines and altars and memorials around the world, but specifically in American culture. And one thing I want to ask is, it kind of seems like a lot of the times when you talk about things like shrines and altars, people assume it’s kinda like an Indiana Jones type of archeological thing where it’s either far in the past or in very different foreign cultures. But would you describe the existence of shrines and memorials as ubiquitous across the world, especially in America as well?

Robert Dobler: I think very much so. Yeah. One of the first things I do in my classes is I, I start to question the students: “Okay, when, when I say the word shrine, what do you think of? Where do you encounter shrines?” And usually if they start to think more and more, they’ll start to say, you know, maybe some exotic things. And then we’ll say, well, shrines and altars I associate with church, with synagogue, with places like this. And, um, we’re very much trying to move into, because this is a folklore class, all of the, this sort of big, um, official practices matter. But we’re really interested in the sort of day to day mundane interactions that people have. So, um, we very quickly start to talk about a shrine as simply a point of communion between the living and the dead or, you know, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be the dead, the spiritual, the otherworldly, the divine. Um, but you know, for the purposes of this class, yes, it’s the dead.

Tanner Chaille: And it’s kind of as if any physical form of memory or keeping memory or memorialization can be considered a shrine. And that’s, I don’t think a lot of people think of it that way.

Robert Dobler: Right? Um, I, I think many more people have shrines than probably think about it. It can be as simple as, uh, an envelope where you’ve kept every birthday card from a grandparent. Um, something that you can go back to and, and your closeness to it, um, evokes your closeness to that person. Um, we’re very much, and again, I do think this is pretty ubiquitous, but I think it’s especially, uh, drawn out, especially emphasized in American culture. Um, this preoccupation with things, how we use material objects to help our memory, to enhance our memory. Really. Um, you know, something that somebody else touched, your grandmother's hand as she wrote a letter to you. Um, it gives it that much more emotional value to you as a way of keeping the dead present.

Tanner Chaille: And definitely it does - it seems like it ranges from those small heirlooms and objects to the bigger ones. When you think of, you know, pyramids or maybe like the Mayan temples and stuff. Um, and that kind of drives this area of dark tourism, which I know is a focus of your class in the fall. Could you define dark tourism and then maybe talk about what interests you about that?

Robert Dobler: Yeah, yeah. Uh, so as with any academic term, um, you’re gonna find a bunch of different definitions, a bunch of debates about it, but, um, for all intents and purposes, it’s tourism, you know, simply going to a location that is associated in some way with death, disaster or atrocity. And that could range from going to visit a battlefield to, uh, going to see, say the, uh, September 11th memorial in New York City, um, it could be going to a house where John Wayne Gacy buried his victims, right? Um, there are all sorts of different kinds of things. It could be going to a wax museum in Salem, Massachusetts, right? Um, so there are many, many layers and levels to it. Uh, but at heart, and the reason this is connected in my mind, in my class to memorials, to altars is these are all ways that we have in, in contemporary times, in Contemporary America of trying to get something of death back.

Robert Dobler: It’s something that we don't typically experience, uh, in a, in a firsthand way. Um, so we seem to be on a folk level, on an everyday level, developing all sorts of practices, whether it’s, um, behaviors, going to tour places. Ghost Tourism is probably the biggest form of dark tourism right now. If you’ve ever gone to a haunted house, you know, outside of an amusement park, maybe, you’ve engaged in dark tourism - these are ways of, of bringing something of the mystery of death back to us without, uh, putting ourselves in, hopefully in any kind of danger.

Tanner Chaille: And if you go to New Orleans, that, that kinda drives probably around half of the tourism in New Orleans because it is known as kind of a ghost town. And it’s an interesting dichotomy between people being afraid of, especially in America, we’re kind of a death shy culture. Um, things like funerals, the bodies are embalmed, they don’t really resemble the way they did in life. And if you go into different cultures, like perhaps the Mexican culture and the tradition of Day of the Dead, it’s less behind closed doors, it’s more of an open conversation. And would you describe events like Day of the Dead in places like Mexico, is that more of a joyful and more of an open tradition than maybe death is treated in America?

Robert Dobler: It seems to be much more, um, celebratory is often the word that is used and, and the United States especially is, is often, uh, called a death denying culture. I mean, people die in hospitals, in hospice, um, away from home, presented again, as you said, embalmed almost as objects ready to, to be examined one last time. Um, there’s less focus, uh, in many ways on death as a physical process in many other cultures and in things like Day of the Dead, uh, much more focused on the return of, of the dead through memory, through the associations, right? People will leave out offerings, um, foods, very sensory things, things that are reminiscent of what the dead was like as they were alive rather than, uh, some of our more, um, Americanized customs of going to, to graveyards. Things like this. Remembering the dead as dead. With something like the day of the dead,

Robert Dobler: You remember the dead as living vital components of our lives. There’s often a push too, in American culture, and again, when I say American culture, that’s largely a white, middle-class Protestant culture. It’s a very much more diverse than that. But there seems to be a tendency to, uh, to look at grief, to look at death as something that we get through. We do the work of mourning and then we put it past us. Whereas in other cultures, we tend to think of death as just another part of life. Something that is always with us. You don't have to forget. You don’t have to move on. You can keep the person with you, which is actually what many of us do anyway. We just feel guilty or, or morbid or it becomes pathologized in a culture where we’re not allowed to talk about it, where it’s not as celebrated, where we don’t necessarily set aside time where we can say, oh, what did you do last night? I spent the night in the cemetery next to my loved ones. Yeah,

Tanner Chaille: That’s not really a point of conversation like, like you, as you said, in Protestant, middle class, White America. Um, and it seems like those graves and cemeteries are kind of considered the ‘official’ way to grieve, the ‘correct’ way to grieve. However, there are always more informal ways to grieve. Um, one thing that really fascinated me when reading about your class was roadside shrines for car accident victims or you know, people who died on the road and you don’t, again, you don’t typically think of that as a shrine, but it is because it exists as a way to keep that memory of that person alive in the place where they died. Right?

Robert Dobler: Right. So we often call them spontaneous shrines, so there’s, there’s a little bit of a performative aspect to it also. Um, when we think about roadside crosses, the sort of white cross put at the side of the road where, where vehicular death has occurred, um, it has many functions, one of these is to, uh, to make the site of tragedy more beautiful, right? People place flowers, um, become very, very pretty, very, very heartfelt spaces that sort of cleanse the, uh, atrocity from the place. Uh, but they also serve as warnings, right? Um, this sort of dual purpose. It’s addressing something. So if you are driving and you’re going around the corner, a sharp turn and you see three or four roadside crosses, you’re going to notice and you’re probably going to slow down. Um, it’s a way of saying “Hey, look, something happened here that should not have happened”.

Robert Dobler: Um, so that because it’s public and because it’s often anonymously put up, um, it speaks in this way. It effects change or it attempts to effect change. So that’s something that we often look at. Um, and that’s a very public one. Um, and it’s very much related to, uh, I think what you were saying about, uh, sort of distancing ourselves from death. Um, we see these sort of solid, formal and, very much one size fits all, you know, arrangements, cemeteries, the things that we expect to see. Uh, on the other hand, we are doing very much more personal, uh, sometimes private, sometimes public things. So, we look at a lot at those sorts of shrines - again shrines because they’re sort of communions - to the flowers and the things that people leave there, um, often people leave notes, signatures. It’s ways of talking to the dead again. Um, I, I consider on that same spectrum, uh, memorial tattoos are something that I’ve been looking into more and more, um, where you have a lot of control over the public or the private aspect of your grief of your morning. Uh, and again, it’s strange to think of a shrine or an altar as something, uh, not tangible, not something that you built. I mean, it is tangible, but it’s in the skin, right? It’s a part of the body.

Tanner Chaille: You carry it with you, right? Yeah, that is very interesting because you see memorials in tattoos and there’s, I don’t know if this is true for everyone, but there is sort of a connotation to that as maybe existing in certain cultures. Like I’ve, I dunno for example, a biker culture where tattoos are a big part of the way that you live and express yourself. That is what you might expect from someone who has that on their body, but at the same time it is a very personal way and in fact a more personal way than a lot of traditional ways of grieving that people can explore. And, um, are there any more informal forms of remembrance that kind of fascinate you beyond tattoos and roadside crosses and shrines because I just think it’s very different than what we typically think of.

Robert Dobler: Oh, right, right. Well, tattoos, roadside shrines... Along the same lines, I’ve done a little bit of work with what’s called ghost bike memorials. Um, and these are white bicycles that are, uh, well, they are bicycles that are painted white and affixed to street posts, um, places where somebody has died in an accident. Um, and these are, uh, often markers for people that are in the cycling community and they’re used to effect, um, environmental change. So they’re used to affect different street laws, uh, things like that. Uh, more and more - and this is really private, it’s a lot harder to sort of track down and, and study these things - there are a lot of uses of ashes of the deceased. They’re called “cremains”, um, that you can put into various shrines. Um, whether it’s mixing them in with a photographic ink and having a portrait done, uh, you could get a mixed into the ink for a tattoo.

Robert Dobler: Um, sometimes cremains are shot into space, put into jewelry, um, turned into records as far as I was just reading about. Yeah. And, and with that, not only can you have, um, a bit of the, the person, the cremains, um, pressed into the vinyl, uh, you can have the vinyl when you play it, the record play it, um, you could play something that was recorded of the deceased.

Tanner Chaille: That’s very nuanced way to, you know, keep someone’s memory alive. And it seems more personal and I think that as things like the Internet and social media had become more popular, there are more informal and at the same time, more personal ways of grief. Could you talk about maybe how social media and the Internet have changed the manners in which we grieve?

Robert Dobler: Yeah. So, uh, with social media websites, so one of the first when I started to look at, and this dates me a little bit was MySpace, uh, where they didn’t have a lot of the privacy in place.

Robert Dobler: Then Facebook is still very much struggling with, um, but you’d get, uh, sites that were just sort of spontaneously converted into memorials. They become shrines in and of themselves. Uh, people continued to visit them and often the information, the pictures, um, the, the likes don’t change. So it’s sort of like, um, like somebody keeping someone’s room, uh, exactly the way it was when they were alive. Uh, the only thing that changes are the sorts of comments that accrue. And with that we see, um, a very big mixture of people writing intensely personal private things, but doing it in a, in a public space, right. Posting it to somebody’s Facebook - or MySpace when I was looking at it. Um, and we, we, you know, so you have a bunch of people writing intensely personal things and they have to know on some level that it’s public, that their friends are also seeing it.

Robert Dobler: But you don’t see them talking to each other on it. There’s just some really interesting things there that we’re still trying to, to figure out. Uh, and then my, my students always like, uh, this part of the class. We talked a little bit about, um, what some of the, uh, some of the advertising companies are starting to do with this. Uh, there was a company for a while. I’m not sure quite what happened if it’s still going or not, but, uh, they were saying that they had enough, um, developed enough, um, AI that they could get your personality basically from if you give them access to your Facebook, your Instagram, your Twitter, uh, they can continue to tweet for you after you’re dead.

Tanner Chaille: That’s a very Black Mirror-esque kind of thing.

Robert Dobler: Yeah. Actually, when we watch an episode of Black Mirror in my class, it’s very similar to that idea, but, um, the idea that we put so much of ourselves online, um, it’s a question people are really starting to have to grapple with, um, business, legally and socially.

Robert Dobler: Uh, what happens to us online when we die? Um, you know, we got things for a little while on Facebook where, uh, you know, Facebook would recommend something to you, so you should like Radiohead because your friends like Radiohead. This person likes Radiohead. Um, but they’d be messages from -- or, or some of the anniversary things. “Do you remember this from five years ago?” But to all of the sudden include people that have died? And it was very, very difficult for Facebook to know which users were dead, which users weren’t. So it started the phenomenon of Facebook ghosts, which could be very unsettling for people. You’d sort of forget for a moment that the person you’re seeing on Facebook is no longer living because so much of our interactions take place in that virtual sphere. So learning to reckon with that, um, is difficult. And that's probably one of the things I’m most excited about in this class is obviously I’m getting older, the students are a lot more fluent with that kind of thing and they always have brilliant insights into what that sort of interaction is like.

Tanner Chaille: Um, I mean I just speaking personally, when someone, a public figure who has a social media presence when they pass, one of my first instincts, strangely enough, is to go to their social media accounts and see, you know, kind of like the record of their “last words” -- in quotes of course, because you know, that’s not the only place that they communicated. But the last thing that they put out is often poignant or even eerie. There just is this seemingly strange connection between the last post they may have made and then the event of their death. And again, it does seem pretty performative when you talk about like memorial pages on Facebook and people leaving comments, it’s a more interactive and more performative way of grieving than just visiting a body and it’s coffin before it goes into the ground.

Robert Dobler: Absolutely. And it’s, it’s important. Um, I mean to a point. It just seems that it is in many ways a healthier way to think about it. Um, when somebody dies, you don’t just put their memory away, you keep it. I mean, it’s really, it’s just building on things that we’ve been doing with, with, um, photography for years and years and years. Right? You keep photos of people you love. Um, and there is this intense fascination with the moment before. What do people think? Do you have any kind of inkling that it’s gonna happen? Did the person know? Were they planning something? What, what would their life have been? Uh, a lot of that is exactly the kind of thing that we think about when we think about memorials or shrines, dark tourism, right? It’s, um, all the sorts of futures that have been sort of forestalled, uh, things that could have been, that aren’t. But also, you know, most of us are only going to experience death firsthand once in our lives.

Robert Dobler: So, there’s a fascination, a lot of people feel sort of squeamish about it, feel guilty about it, but it’s something that’s very, very human to think about that moment. So, um, I sometimes think about this as the difference between memorials and monuments, right? Um, if you think about all of the memorials that happened after September 11th, uh, we had spontaneous shrines all over New York City, all over the country. Um, people, you know, putting flowers, writing notes, um, drawing pictures, writing poems, um, it just sort of this massive outpouring that just covered neighborhoods, right? Um, and then years later we get the official monument. Monuments are often, um, expressive of what happened. They, they sort of show a unity there, right? This is how the American people have responded to this. Um, and we see a monument sort of rebuilding a whole people out of what had been very fragmented.

Robert Dobler: Uh, the memorials on the other hand, there’s a lot more room for messiness, a lot more room for different voices. Um, people angry for all sorts of different reasons. People sad, um, expressing all sorts of emotion that, years later, it’s hard to access again. So, um, there’s definitely, um, and I also teach courses on legends, so I can’t help but think about memorials and monuments in terms of narrative that starts to get built. How do we understand death? How do we understand tragedy when it has happened? Whether it’s, uh, somebody we love dying or a big disaster. Uh, and the truth is we don’t, we can’t in many ways. Um, memorials are often are sort of fumbling, very human ways, based on, uh, the values that we have. The things that our neighbors, uh, the communities that we’re in, whether it’s religious groups, occupational groups, um, regional groups. The things that have meaning to us, we sort of build again from that we sort of make meaning.

Robert Dobler: Um, we look at the way a person’s life impacted ours and all of these different ways. Uh, and that’s very personal and very, very variable, right? Um, everybody can remember, can add their own voice, can think in different ways as opposed to, um, things that we signal is more official, are well, the funeral industry, anything that you can call an industry sort of has a homogenizing effect, right? Um, less personal. And it’s fine in many ways when something happens, we need to have an industry in place. We need something that can lead us through the steps, but we also often feel that it’s not enough to capture our loss, the personal things that are becoming sort of effaced or smoothed over, um, in the service of moving us through the motions. Right? So it’s sort of push and pull and often the folk side, especially by folklorists, gets sort of valorized. And I don't mean to do that either. I mean it’s a lot to say for, for the monumental. For coming together. For finding some sort of unity. But it also often, um, sort of smooths over individual responses. Right?

Tanner Chaille: And then I was gonna ask if you considered things like the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument as forms of shrine building. And it kinda seems like in certain ways, yes, but in certain ways, no, because those effigies are positions of strength. You think of the Lincoln monument isas very strong. It’s a, it’s a portrait of how, you know, forbearing and persevering he was as a leader. Whereas something more like a memorial is much more vulnerable.

Robert Dobler: Right? You can think of who’s controlling the narrative, right? What narrative is the Lincoln Memorial, um, what is that partaking of? Right. And we can have different opinions, different ideas about it, but only to a point, right? I mean, it sits there. It’s huge. It’s very powerful. It’s a throne. It is. Right. Um, and so it’s, it’s speaking a certain language that has to do with nation building, with, with who we are. Um, and then of course that “who we are” phrase is where the folk I think comes back into it also. So I would very much call those shrines, call those memorials. Um, just much more on the official level. So I mean, you could even think of it as crassly as where the money comes from, who funds these things is often a way to think about to folk versus the, the official. But, um, we often think of folk as as having a lot to do with change, with variability, right? Um, passed down traditionally. So, um, roadside crosses, you know, people don’t learn how to make a roadside cross. You see one, maybe a friend of yours has made one for somebody, you know, God forbid. Um, but we learn from watching other people, from seeing them, from encountering them. Um, whereas, you know, to be an undertaker to, to, uh, carve, tombstones, um, it’s much more, uh, something that you have to be instructed in.

Tanner Chaille: Yeah, it’s more, um, I don’t want to say sterile, but it’s, it’s less personal. If you see someone who works with the dead on a regular basis, they don’t have the connection to the individual as the people who knew them did. Uh, so you’re teaching a class on this very topic and the broad topic we’ve been talking about in the fall as part of Themester. So the course description reads, “These spontaneous responses to tragedy, are culturally, spiritually and politically meaningful. They transform spaces of death into statements that demand action.” Now you’ve talked about, you know, how roadside crosses may warn that it’s a dangerous turn on the road, but could you explain what that means to you in a broader sense, perhaps, uh, speaking about how these become statements and not just...

Robert Dobler: So, it comes back to narrative in some ways too. Um, and especially when we start to think about dark tourism. Um, so I grew up in, this gets to one of the earlier questions you asked me too. I grew up about 20 miles from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Um, civil war tourism is, is all over the place there. And, uh, you can literally walk down the street in the summer night and there will be people in, in civil war uniforms sort of peeking out of doorways and saying, Hey, do you wanna see some ghosts? You know, they’ll take you out to the battlefield and, and show you ghosts. And it starts to, uh, potentially trivialize or fragment. And here I’m borrowing words from another folklorist on campus, Diane Goldstein. Um, it can, it can trivialize, it can fragment - although, she argues that these things don’t actually happen - um, our relationship to history. To what actually happened to real historic, awful events. Um, you can think of, uh, plantation tourism, right? Where, uh, people can go and, uh, and you know, have supernatural encounters with the ghosts of former slaves. That’s really getting into some risky territory there. Uh, you know, you want to honor and respect this really awful, awful, uh, history that we have. Um, and the arguments go well, it’s keeping history alive and you know, the arguments go well, it’s trivializing it. I mean you are, you are especially, you know, and this isn’t even getting into whether or not you believe there are actually ghosts or haunted things at these places, but, um, it gets messy. So it’s all about, uh, what voices are being represented. Uh, and whenever we are memorializing somebody, whenever we’re creating any kind of altar, any kind of shrine, um, there’s the personal voice, right? The person who has lost somebody, um, that is entering into it, the person who has been lost. And we are often trying to recapture and reclaim some part of that. Um, and that can be very tricky too. Um, so who speaks for whom, uh, is probably one of the biggest parts of this. Um, and in terms of the, the bigger ideas of Themester, Remembering and Forgetting, uh, those again are really tricky. Um, who’s allowed to remember? Who’s allowed to remember what? Who’s allowed to speak? Uh, who says what the memory is? What happens to people who remember things differently? Um, who’s allowed to forget?

Tanner Chaille: What do we choose to forget?

Robert Dobler: What do we choose to forget? Um, forgetting as a privilege. Uh, you know, not everybody can forget the same sorts of things that have happened. Um, and so I tend to look at that on a much more personal and small group level. But, um, these questions very quickly blow up and turn into bigger things.

Tanner Chaille: It’s true that when you think about, you know, especially the one having to do with slavery and plantations, that is definitely a territory that begins to perhaps marginalize what may have happened because you're not, you’re not hearing from people who experienced that. However, in a larger sense, it is a way to bring these kind of very distant memories of history into the very personal space and experiencing those for yourself is a way to make them more real and to make them more significant. It’s kind of a thin line between are we making this more real? Or are we fictionalizing or making it sort of a performative thing. It’s hard.

Robert Dobler: Right. That’s exactly the crux. And yeah, I don’t have answers there, but, um, it’s one of the things that I try to do in this class is to get students to think about it a little bit more. We had some of our, I’ve taught this class once or twice before and uh, we had some very, very productive discussions. Um, we just looked online at the, uh, the, uh, 9/11 memorial gift shot. Um, there’s a range of things. I mean, you can get snow globes, you can get, um, dog collars, you can get t-shirts you can get - it was a lot of discussion in class over what things were in good taste, what things were in poor taste. And it made us realize how much context is a part of that. Right? Um, who are you getting this for? Do you have to go and buy it in person? Can you get it through mail? All of these things changed people’s opinions just in the class over whether or not something was okay or not. Okay. Whether it’s taboo, whether it’s something we should stay away from. Um, but you could very quickly start to see other people’s points too. And really, I wish I could take it a little bit farther than this, but it’s enough for me to have people understand that it’s a lot messier than we’re often led to believe.

Tanner Chaille: But, um, so you said that you’ve, you’ve taught this class before coming up in the fall. Is there something new that you’re exploring? Something new you’re trying, that you’re especially excited for perhaps, or just something that you’re trying to talk about again?

Robert Dobler: Haha, I’m uh, always really interested in, I, I kind of said this, I’m really interested in, um, what students’ experiences are with this stuff online. Um, not just online but, but very much online. Um, but I always have the students do a group research projects and, uh, they come up with such interesting things coming from so many different - so I’m always very interested in that. I’ve had students write about, uh, uh, rhetoric used in, uh, anti gun speeches in the wake of some school shootings. I’ve had students just go around town and document, uh, roadside crosses, memorial trees. I’m finding all kinds of different ways that our lives are, are always touching on these things that we, we don’t always think about. Um, but yeah, so I’m, and this is maybe a little selfish of me too, I’m, I’m very much interested in, uh - I’m still the most recent, uh, that I am is probably on Instagram. I’ve been looking at Instagram memorials, so I want to know what people are actually using, what people are doing, uh, how they encounter death and, and memory. Not even death. I mean, it doesn’t always have to be death and life. Just, um, you know, I opened it up to, to memory in general, how do we structure our lives? So we’d like to think a lot about how, uh, the different formats, the platforms of the various, um, social networking sites we use, how they constrict us, what sorts of things they allow. I mean, there are so many, only so many ways that you can present yourself on, on Instagram. Right? Um, there are only so many options, only so many filters. Uh, how do we cut through that and what does that do to our memory? Uh, what does that do to our, our level of interaction with people?

Tanner Chaille: Um, how do we avoid sterilizing it and making it real, you know, well, we’re attaining a facade of, you know, having it together.

Robert Dobler: Right? Or is that even still a worry? I mean, as somebody who’s pushing 40, that strikes me as a very, very important worry. But then I, you know, I, I talk to students all the time who, who navigate it so smoothly that it makes me wonder, maybe, maybe I'm looking at it wrong. So that's really what I'm interested in is seeing what the students are doing or what they can teach me. I mean, it's interesting, as cliched as that sounds.

Tanner Chaille: No. Yeah. It's interesting to think about grief as forever changing and especially with the Internet. I mean, it is changing all around us, but, um, yeah, it's very interesting. I think a lot of people aren't open to having these kinds of conversations because they are uncomfortable. But I think it's an important way to contextualize how we live with memory, how memory exists and fiscal ways right beside us. And I think that's what makes it really intriguing.

Robert Dobler: Yes. Yeah, absolutely.

Tanner Chaille: Some, I believe there is a prescribed method of grieving the fancy casket, massive flower arrangements and somber tombstone are often treated as the official way, but this conversation illustrated the reality that there are unending ways in which we keep someone's memory alive. A tattoo, a Facebook page, and even a vinyl record can all be employed for the purpose of memorialization. It's a question we all have to grapple with, no matter how uncomfortable it might be. How do we want to be remembered? Remembering and Forgetting is a podcast produced for Themester at IU. Special thanks to IU's College of Arts and Sciences, Tracy Bee, Ken Smith, and the Media School for today's episode. Music for this episode by Jack Brown. For more discussions on memories surrounding marking our nation's landscapes, the effects of stress on memory, and more. Check out the rest of Remembering and Forgetting. Thank you for listening.