Burying

Burying

Transcript for Burying (full episode)

You're listening to State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

I'm Eileen Williams.

Each week, we pick a common human experience, like joking or obsession, and bring you stories that explore and deepen that experience.

Today, we're bringing you stories about burying.

It doesn't matter what we bury, a body, a feeling or an object.

We expect it to stay buried.

We put it aside and bid it farewell.

But what happens when things go awry?

We may not like to admit it, but sometimes the grave is not a final resting place.

It is a crisp January morning in New Haven, Connecticut.

The year is 1824.

Bathsheba Smith, 19 years old, has just died of a mysterious illness.

Her family of Pierton farmers gathers in the local cemetery.

They watch as her body is buried.

Her coffin is lowered into the ground and slowly covered up by earth.

A headstone marks her final resting place.

Comforted by the knowledge her soul has found peace, Bathsheba's family returns home.

They leave their grief at the side of the grave, mixed in with the dirt that covers her body.

At home, they clean the mud from their fingernails.

Bodies had been going missing ever since Yale had founded its medical school ten years before.

To teach anatomy, the school needed human cadavers, but laws prohibited access to the dead.

In response, doctors turned to body snatching.

They would either hire professional resurrectionists, or, in some cases, would dig up the bodies themselves.

To most people in the community, what was buried was meant to stay buried.

But to aspiring doctors, the bodies were crucial tools for studying anatomy.

To them, some bodies were worth digging up.

That cold January day, Bathsheba's father and friends stormed the medical school and demanded to search for her body.

They tore apart every classroom and laboratory for evidence.

Finally, in the cellar, they noticed something strange.

Village Constable Erasmus Osborne writes, The earth appeared fresher between the stones and finally took up a large flat stone where we discovered a white bundle, apparently a bundle of clothes.

We examined and found a human body, doubled up in a heap, entirely covered up with the grave clothes.

We took it out and it was immediately known to be the body of the young woman we were searching for.

After the revelation, a riot ensued.

Members of the angry mob armed themselves with pistols, stones and knives.

They advanced on the medical school.

The students barred the gates of the school.

Inside they waited, terrified of the bloodthirsty rioters.

After two days and two nights, the state militia finally intervened.

The mob was sent home.

In the end, everything was blamed on the lowly medical assistant.

He was imprisoned for the crime.

As a result, Connecticut passed an act that condemned anyone who dug up the dead.

Medical schools no longer use body snatchers to dig up corpses for their labs.

But we still bury all kinds of things.

We bury even when it's difficult or complicated or dangerous.

In today's episode, we'll investigate why we bury and what happens when things go wrong.

We'll explore the idea of burying through seven very different stories.

First, we journey to the distant land of Mongolia to investigate what happens when ancient tradition comes into conflict with modern global reality.

Next, continue along our wild subterranean adventure with long-dead furry friends, therapeutic art assignments, frozen heads and a mysterious vessel named Alvin.

All that and more up next on State of the Human.

In our first story, Braden Grant recipient Reade Levinson travels all the way to Mongolia in hopes of witnessing an ancient practice known as sky burial.

Once there, she finds out how the forces of urbanization, modernization and environmental change may be threatening this sacred ritual.

The main bus station in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, is starting to get hot.

People are texting, swatting flies, sometimes both.

The men tap their riding boots on the fractured cobblestones.

Women in shiny ballet flats, red-cheeked children, cling on to their pant legs.

I see a man in a button-down shirt clutching a briefcase and typing madly on his cell phone.

Good morning.

This is my translator, Gunbat.

Yeah, it was so hot there.

Today, I've asked him to show me a burial.

We set off for half an hour and get off at a meat market at the far end of the city, a grungy neighborhood with no running water or electricity.

It's one of the many gare districts, places where families who've just moved to the city set up their nomadic gares or yurts.

It's Sunday and everyone is out and about buying produce for the week.

We walk north, away from the hubbub.

Passing cars kick up dust on the dirt road.

We squeeze between a break in the fence and keep walking.

There are three funeral practices in Mongolia.

Cremation, burial, and what I've come to see, sky burial.

The name sky burial is a bit of a contradiction.

The Mongolian translates to open air burial.

In reality, bodies aren't buried, but instead wrapped in a white shroud and left on a mountainside for vultures to eat.

To do it properly, you need to go somewhere remote, some piece of untouched nature, which is a problem if you live in a bustling city.

These hills are where city dwellers come to do open air burials.

It's close enough for families who can't afford to travel into the countryside and far enough not to be a hygiene issue for anyone around.

Or so we were told.

What we find is completely different.

Families have moved into the graveyard on the hillside and their cows graze among the headstones.

Trash fills the space where streams usually flow.

This is not the sort of place you'd want to leave a loved one, or anyone really.

Have yourself some tea if you like.

To figure out what's going on, I ask an expert on Mongolian funerary traditions.

I've always been interested in death.

Christine Murphy is a graduate student at UCSB writing her PhD on how developments affecting religious tradition in Mongolia.

We meet in a cafe.

Christine says sky burials used to be the perfect fit to both the spirituality and the geography of Mongolia.

If you have diggable land with lots of worms, it'll decompose in the ground.

But when you look at the Gobi, where the sand moves so quickly, it's harder to bury.

When you look up north, where there's a layer of permafrides, it's harder to bury.

If you've got a lot of trees, you can burn them, you can cremate it.

If you have no trees, it's harder to cremate.

In the past, leaving a dead body on a hillside wasn't a problem in Mongolia.

Given the lack of human population density in Mongolia, you're not likely to stumble across a body in the countryside, so it's also not a hygiene issue, and it's not socially or culturally problematic, because it's so big here.

You can leave a body and no one will come across it.

Ulaanbaatar was built for 50,000 people.

Today, the population is 1.7 million.

As the population exploded, the city expanded.

Hillsides that used to be remote enough to leave a body now make up someone's backyard.

What it used to be, remote, far away from the city, is now smack dab in the middle of a major residential area.

It's getting more difficult and more expensive to do an open-air burial, but people try anyway.

Christine, like many researchers, isn't sure where open-air burials originated.

We know that the tradition has been practiced in Mongolia for centuries, since the introduction of Buddhism.

As far back as the 7th century, texts from Tibet tell stories of zombies.

The vultures are so strong that if one took one hand and the other took the other hand, they could physically lift the body up in the air, jerking it back and forth.

And so some people think that the tradition of, like, these zombie stories that are in Tibetan texts from, like, the 7th century come from being out in the countryside and seeing this dead body dancing around because they're a bird on either side.

But historical customs changed drastically in 1921, when Mongolia had a communist revolution with the help of the Soviet Russians.

During the Soviet period, open air burials were considered to be unhygienic.

They were considered to be religious, which was bad, superstitious and backwards.

Communist rhetoric talks a lot about hygiene.

It talks a lot about progress.

So anything that doesn't seem to be very sterile and forward-moving is considered antiquated, inappropriate and potentially dangerous.

Mongolia was communist until 1992, and the stigma of sky burials as backwards still hangs around.

Many view the tradition as a threat to public health and their right to worry.

As more and more Mongolians move from the countryside into Ubi, the practice of leaving a body out is causing problems.

Citing hygiene concerns, the municipal government passed an ordinance last year that makes sky burials illegal in and around Ubi.

The fine is equivalent to three months' wages.

But Ganbat heard rumors that people still leave bodies here, in the graveyard, in violation of the ordinance.

So here we are.

As we walk, Ganbat explains just why the tradition is so important to Mongolia.

We are Buddhist and we believe that we will be reborn and that death is something, one phase of life is finished and you are moving on to the next phase.

More than 80% of Mongolians are Buddhist, and the idea that souls are reincarnated after death is a core belief to Buddhism.

But in Mongolia, reincarnation isn't a passive process.

Worse, it's not guaranteed that you will transition to the next life.

Souls can stick around and become unhappy and potentially destructive ghosts.

All ties to your past life, clothes, books, shoes, must be destroyed, lest they distract your soul from moving on.

Skye barrels are important because they allow the body to be completely consumed.

All traces of a person's previous life disappear, and their spirit is free to continue on to its next life.

But this also means that it's really hard to find evidence of where sky barrels might still be happening.

As we walk, Ganbat chants mantras to ward off the ghosts of souls that might still be attached to this earth.

I find myself walking a bit faster, glancing around at the gravestones, wondering if I too should learn these mantras.

It starts to rain and the wind picks up.

Little droplets make their way past my rain jacket, and I shiver.

We're feeling pretty down about not being able to find any evidence of sky burial.

And I want to talk to someone who's seen one.

Tsog Badrach and Tuya are a couple in their 50s.

Tsog Badrach is one of Ganbat's best friends.

He left the countryside 20 years ago and came to UB for work.

I'm sitting on a big leather couch, facing a flat screen TV.

His wife, Tuya, offers me little candies and a mug full of Ayrig, or fermented mare's milk.

It's a Mongolian delicacy, slightly alcoholic, and, to me, tastes like vomit.

Tsog Badrach begins the story.

Ten years ago, Tuya's mother has just died.

Ten years ago, our mother-in-law passed away, and the whole family came together to discuss what to do next.

At that time, this tradition was being revived, and open-air burials were very popular.

We checked with an astrologer Lama, and he said an open-air burial would bring the best karma, so that's how we decided.

An astrologer Lama is a very special Lama, trained in the mathematics of reading horoscopes.

The astrologer Lama asks the family for the mother's birthdate and the date and time of death, using an ancient text called the Alten Gobi.

The Lama triangulates these two dates.

The Lama tells Sog Badrach if he wants a good reincarnation for his mother-in-law, open-air burial is the best chance.

But Sog Badrach is nervous.

He's lived in UB for 35 years, never seen or heard of sky burials.

For me, I felt a bit strange because it was the first time I'd heard about an open-air burial, so I felt a bit nervous.

Mongolians believe the soul is in limbo for 49 days after death.

If good karma is generated during this limbo period, she will get a good reincarnation.

So the Lama gives detailed instructions to the family, hoping for the best karma.

On Monday, at 10 a.m., she passed away.

We buried her maybe on a Wednesday, very quickly.

We selected this place at the foot of a mountain, facing the sun.

The Lama said it had to happen before sunrise, before the sun came up and hit that spot.

We had this Korean Starex van, and those who were born in a compatible animal year were allowed to go.

We had a board, a wooden board and some planks, and we used them to move her body.

According to the astrology, open burials have to happen in the morning.

Sogbad Rakh and his wife wake up early to drive outside the city.

So the body was laid on the ground, and the llama stood at the head.

And the llama said to everyone, don't be afraid, this is normal.

Because for many people it was their first time seeing a sky burial, and they were nervous.

They drive as instructed, expecting to arrive at a pristine, remote mountainside.

What they find is the exact opposite.

There were bodies, people without heads, hands.

We saw it, a terrible site.

And birds were coming, and we watched.

They were carrying some limbs, taking some, flying back.

Sukhbarach tells me that the vultures know who has good karma and who has bad karma.

On the far hillside, neighbors watch with binoculars to see how long the bodies go uneaten.

When there weren't enough vultures to eat his mother-in-law, neighbors began rumors that his mother was a simple person.

She must have had bad karma, they said.

Vultures aren't eating her.

Sukhbarach and Tuya tried to do the right thing.

They followed the astrologer Lama's instructions, trying to bring the best karma to their mother's soul and to their family.

But Sukhbarach says the experience was awful.

They were disturbed by what they saw, and worse, neighbors began rumors that ruined his mother's reputation.

Sukhbarach says open air burials have no place in a city like UB.

Banning this for the city, it was the right thing to do.

We've been out here all day searching for evidence of sky burials.

We see a small guard house and decide to investigate.

A sign next to the guard house says, by the district police department, open burials are not permitted in the municipality of UB.

Beneath the sign sits a guard, a woman in her 40s.

She puts down her magazine to chat with us.

She's wearing a T-shirt and loose sweatpants, her hair tied up in the heat.

She explains that the city government pays her to watch over the cemetery.

Do people still do open air burials here, we ask?

She says, no more open burials happen here.

Yeah, she says, not so much open burials as then.

Almost zero, she says.

But I think she's afraid, I think.

She thinks that we're inspecting her work.

Ganba is unconvinced.

He thinks she's lying.

So I'd say everything's good, she says.

She's kind of like reporting to us.

Despite spending an entire summer in Mongolia and investigating multiple leads and hillsides, I wasn't able to see a sky burial.

I learned that, just like in any culture, funerals are private things.

Observing something that private, the neighbors watching with binoculars, it just doesn't leave families with a good feeling.

It's bad for karma.

But there was one aspect I still had yet to investigate.

The vultures.

Thank you for calling the Copian Center for Conservation Learning at Hawk Mountain Sanctuary.

If you know your party's extension, you may enter it at any time.

For Dr.

Keith Bildstein, style 108.

For Dr.

Laurie Goodrich, style...

There's another problem facing sky burials.

As more and more people move to the city, the nomadic way of life is changing.

As Mongolia urbanizes, vulture populations are threatened.

I talk with Dr.

Keith Bildstein.

Hello, this is Keith.

Keith directs the Conservation Science Program at Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Pennsylvania.

I learned from Keith that vultures have a much more intimate relationship with people than I ever realized.

People have been leading vultures around because they've been herding sheep and cattle and goats for a long time, thousands of years.

As scavengers, vultures' role in the food chain is to take out the trash.

As people migrate, vultures follow, eating everything we leave behind, animals and humans included.

Survival based on eating our trash, Keith explains, becomes an issue when we make our trash toxic.

When people start providing veterinary drugs to the herds of cattle, they run the risk that those veterinary drugs may be toxic to the birds.

When societies transition from nomadic to rural agriculture, herders begin to use veterinary drugs to stop diseases from spreading between closely packed animals.

So far, Mongolia's been safe from the harmful effects of these veterinary drugs.

In the countryside, culture remains nomadic and herders don't need agricultural drugs.

The lack of the veterinary drugs' widespread use in Mongolia is something I guess you could say is a godsend.

But I wonder what will happen to the birds as Mongolia continues to industrialize.

Almost certainly, it's not going to have a positive effect.

Whether it will have a negative effect will depend upon the drugs involved and the vultures' vulnerability to these drugs.

Sometimes doing things the old-fashioned way are actually a lot better for the environment.

The future does not look pretty for Mongolia's vultures.

As we continue to load our bodies with life-extending drugs, we are making the world more dangerous for its vultures.

One of the last things I did in Mongolia, I had my horoscope read.

I pull out the spreadsheet I was given by the astrologer llama.

I still don't understand the mathematics, just the output, underground burial.

I guess I'm a little disappointed.

After all, I've been studying sky burials for the last half year, and there's still something magical for me in the idea of giving yourself so completely back to nature.

In Mongolia, the rules don't matter.

It's not about sky burials themselves.

It's about karma, the sum of a person's actions and how people will find ways to pay it forward when they can no longer give their bodies to animals.

That story was produced by Braden Grant recipient, Reade Levinson.

Sometimes, what we bury is a whole lot closer to home.

It's extremely painful to lose a family member, even when that family member is not human.

When a furry friend passes away, it can be hard to know exactly how to mark that departure.

In our next story, we talk to a group of people who know all too well how hard it is to say goodbye to a beloved pet.

And we learn about a group of people who are helping others do just that.

Ticker, Frosty Oliver, Tina, Bumble, Lulu, Stoney, Harry.

In Memory of Bor Bor, November 1st, 1986, December 11th, 1996.

Beloved Fido, January 27th, 1999 to February 20th, 2011.

You are always our boy and forever loved.

Sleep with the angels in peace until we meet again.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Is this for a burial or what do we?

Well, we do cremations and also lawn burials.

The cremations are done in the back.

We have our crematoriums here.

And we also offer the private individual cremation and also witness cremation where people can actually come and view the cremation.

They watch the pet being placed into the crematorium and then also the sweeping of the remains.

I've worked here 16 years and at first I didn't like the job.

I was too depressing.

Honestly, it was like, oh, everybody was crying and then it happened to me.

And then I realized the process of losing a pet, the grief, what you go through, now I love it.

Just to meet a lot of cool, loving people.

My mom brought her home when I was two.

She was a cat.

We lived close to some train tracks and she found her there.

She was just walking by herself and she was like, less than a month old.

I always loved animals.

From when I could understand what an animal was, I just have always been obsessed with animals.

So we get to this nursery and there were fish there.

And I was so excited because it was just so fun.

I begged to get one and I remember them picking them out.

And then the person who was helping us scooped them up with a little net and put them in the little baggies.

And then I got to hold them on the way back.

And there was just this glob of water with these three beautiful living things in it.

And I remember setting up the tank, pouring the rocks in and setting up the little plants.

And they had a little house and then the sound of the filter with just the constant dripping of water.

It became very soothing to me.

She actually did save me from a bully once.

When I was in first grade, a bully on the bus was beating me up and he was on top of me and we were across the street from my house and she ran and chased him away, which was pretty awesome.

So I got to give her credit for that.

I consider them as my family.

I don't think of them as just pets.

My daily life was marked by their constant companionship and just having them around really made a difference for me.

It sounds stupid, but I kind of feel like they knew too that we had something special.

I will celebrate their birthdays, make them drawings, put presents for them on the Christmas tree.

He tells me that people are good or bad, and I go with what he tells me.

If he doesn't go next to a person, then I know that person is somebody I should watch, and I do, and he's right 100% of the time.

She had a stroke when she was, you know, maybe it was 12 or 13, so we decided we were going to put her down and the whole family went to the vet.

And it was one of the most traumatizing experiences of my life.

It was the first time I saw my dad cry.

And so it was really tough.

It was, it was awful.

We were all there and, you know, they give her a shot and it's really kind of a sad thing.

We were sitting around the table and they were all petting her and they give her a shot and she just goes to sleep.

I'm in fifth grade and Teddy was four years old and he got hit by a car outside the vet's office.

Sasha was drenched.

So we went to the vet and he's told us that she had a tumor in one of her lungs and there was really nothing we could do.

There were only two options, either have her suffer for one more week and then she would pass away or we could just put her down.

And it was very painful, but that's what we decided to do because we just thought that it would be very selfish for us to keep her alive just for ourselves.

It was so painful because she literally was like my sister.

It was like deciding to put down my sister.

That was definitely one of the most painful moments in my life.

In my life.

These are my crematories.

Small pets, under 20 pounds, I cremate them.

And these ones are the ones over 20 pounds.

They take about an hour to, an hour and a half for less than 20 pounds.

Over 20 pounds, they'll take about two hours.

Right here, this is my area, where I do the boxes.

A pine box, like this one.

I got one tomorrow, so I gotta bury.

So I got it made already.

So right now I'm making one for a big dog.

Then I gotta bury two.

So, this is a horse in here.

And I basically do everything here.

I love my job, love my job.

It's not an easy job, but I, you know, I have to deal with a lot of people with a lot of pain, come through here, lots of their pet and all that stuff.

I've had experiences when people come with their pet in their arms.

It's just like any human being, you know.

You have to treat it like that.

That's the part of this job.

Because people are really get attached to their companion, to their pet, you know.

Burial ceremonies and recognizing the life and the death of someone you care about or something you care about, I think that is important and it is necessary.

I don't think it's necessary in just a practical utilitarian thing.

It serves a more spiritual, internal, reflective need.

And if we weren't emotional creatures, there wouldn't be such thing as a funeral.

Whenever I pass these places, I think about them.

I remember a little time when I did something with one of them, like taking Turbo on a walk.

It's important to resurface those memories because they're such a big part of my childhood and they wouldn't be resurfaced as frequently if I didn't have places for them.

Also, when you say goodbye to a pet, you're saying goodbye to all the years that you've spent with that pet and it's kind of like mourning the passage of time and how an animal can signify whatever it was you did over those years.

It's the finality, you know.

You have to take things from start to finish.

Just like you feed a little baby, you would, you know, if you were bearing an old man.

Same thing like that.

That's why, you know, throughout history, that's what we've done it.

You will always live in our hearts, Captain Junior.

My beloved sweetheart, Zupisaur II.

Bumble.

Ginger number two.

Stewie, you were a good boy.

Our beloved baby gave us more love than any human.

That story was produced by Jackson Roche and Yue Li.

It featured music by Alex Finch, Ketza and Pottington Bear.

Next up, we meet someone who takes a very different approach to death and burying.

Humans are drawn to narrative.

We like a story that has a beginning, a middle and an end, because our lives are structured that way.

We're born without much choice in the matter.

We live a life where we do some things in the middle.

And then after it's all said and done, we tie up the loose ends, or not, and pass on.

For some, however, the idea of life ending, of permanent burial and closure, is anything but peaceful.

It's not something to accept, but something to correct.

It's sometimes said that cryonics is the second worst thing that can happen to you.

The worst thing that can happen is to die without cryonics.

Jim Yount is the acting president of the American Cryonics Society, a non-for-profit that helps connect people to services that will vitrify them indefinitely after death, in the hopes that one day science will be able to revive them.

His office is in Sunnyvale, in the heart of Silicon Valley.

Let's see.

And has a large bookshelf in the corner.

Prolongivity, freezing down.

We've got, what do you care what other people think?

A couple of copies of the Bible.

The office is small, only two connecting rooms, and looks and smells like it hasn't changed since the early 80s.

In one room sits an extensive bookshelf next to a pile of large orange boxes.

Emergency supplies for an unexpected freezing.

The modern cryonics movement started in 1964, when a man named Robert Ettinger wrote a book called The Prospect of Immortality.

The possibility of life after death is explored in Phoenix, Arizona by the Cryonic Society.

They believe that cryobiology, the freezing of biological matter, is the answer.

They propose freezing bodies in cold storage capsules.

Scientists are mostly skeptical.

A model demonstrates how one person, a California man who died of cancer, has already been frozen.

A freezing liquid replaces the blood supply, and the subject is wrapped in aluminum foil and placed in a capsule at 220 degrees below zero centigrade.

Jim first heard about cryonics on The Johnny Carson Show.

Robert Ettinger appeared on the program and talked about the subject of cryonics and the fact that the first man to be frozen with the idea of someday perhaps coming back, that that event had happened, and that interested me.

Sure, why not?

What do I possibly have to lose?

But Jim didn't make any immediate moves to sign up until years later.

When I came to California, and I was looking in a mirror, shaving, and saw those first few gray hairs appeared, and I said to myself if you're going to make arrangements to be frozen yourself, you better do it.

So in 1972, he began to make some phone calls.

At first, it was difficult.

He didn't even know what the process was called.

I finally talked to someone, I think in the anatomy department at Stanford, and they said, well, the word is cryogenics.

Well, that wasn't really the word, but at least that gave me a place to start.

After many cold calls, he reached the Bay Area Cryonics Society.

But they were so new, they didn't have any mechanism for interested people to sign up.

I thought there'd be thousands and thousands of people signed up for cryonics, but I found out that wasn't the case at all, and it was still something very much in its infancy.

And if I really wanted the service, I was gonna have to pitch in and be a volunteer, kind of like volunteer firemen do.

Since the mid-70s, Jim has been volunteering in a variety of roles.

But cryonics has never become the mainstream phenomena him and other cryonicists believe it should be.

Since 1972...

There's only been, eh, maybe 320, 340 people frozen worldwide.

300 is an incredibly small number.

When you think about how many people have died since the 1970s...

I do not know why there are not lines a block long in front of every cryonics organization of people trying to sign up.

Jim thinks people are too comfortable with the idea of blacking out one day and never waking up.

He doesn't understand why more people wouldn't make this choice for themselves.

We've become very familiar with the usual ways of living and dying, and people expect that you're gonna be buried or be cremated.

And there's been literally thousands of years when these were the only options.

And then the American Cryonic Society comes along and we say, well, maybe there's another option.

Maybe you really don't have to die forever, for sure.

There's a possibility that you can be frozen and maybe come back someday.

And it just does not fit in the way people have grown up and thought about death and dying.

For Jim, the acceptance of death is simply cultural conditioning.

So when people do die, it's doubly tragic.

They're gone in both body and soul.

A complete death.

The grieving process is more difficult when friends and family members who are not signed up for cryonics die.

Because you wish you could reach out and say, George, you could have lived forever, but you didn't understand.

And that's hard.

A cryonist looks at death not as a finality, but as a juncture.

But there is a hope that comes from having signed up for cryonics.

Okay, so do you think that that hope...

When thinking about death, many people turn to a god or a higher power.

Jim puts his faith in science.

I think, you know, we're not going to heaven, we're going to the future.

That story was produced by Braden Grant recipient Nicole Bennett-Fite.

It featured music by Foolboy Media and Karma Ron.

In our next story, we're going to hear from Naveen Kassamali, an art therapist working in the Bay Area.

She shares how complicated life can become when we try to bury something that refuses to stay in its place.

A group of friends and I, we went to Mexico, across the border.

I was only 19.

We're coming back and they stopped us.

My name is Adnan, last name is Khan.

My name is Naveen Kasimali and I am a therapist, an art therapist and I am from Fremont, California.

And then they start questioning us.

And one guy, I literally heard him say on his phone, oh, we got a bunch of Mohammeds.

My friends had pictures of his girlfriend and then he's like, hey, like, can you guys respect my privacy?

And the guy's like, it's cool, I don't like camel.

We felt very violated, really, really violated.

To be honest with you, I just accepted it.

I was like, whatever, like what's gonna happen?

If I go and I complain to somebody, nothing's gonna happen.

Do you remember how it felt to do the art therapy?

Yes, yes I did.

I enjoyed drawing.

It's called an anger box.

And basically on a piece of paper, you write down or draw your feelings and then you rip it up.

You put it in the box.

There was this weird release of tension when I ripped up the paper.

The box is containing your anger, so there's a release and also a safe environment and a containing environment.

I was surprised that I felt the way that I did.

In my family, Muslim culture doesn't really share a lot.

We don't wanna be judged by people, so we keep everything to ourselves.

I mean, we're not taught how to communicate.

I think that if you suppress an emotion for a long time, you don't engage it.

If you bury it, it stinks up your whole life.

It brings back things that you should have dealt with a long time ago.

A long time ago.

Carl Young, he calls therapists wounded healers.

He says that usually someone who goes into the field has something that they need to process.

They're telling you to look inside and look inward and look at things that you need to work out.

The deeper you go and the more you know about yourself, the more you can help someone else.

When I made them deal with the feelings, people got angrier, but then they're also not processing it.

So then where's that anger going and how's that affecting my community?

I think there's a lot of work to be done.

That story was produced by Cathy Wong and Jenny March.

It featured music by Roscoe, Blue Dot Sessions and Tours.

Burying can cause as many problems as it solves.

We've seen that people often tend to view the act of burying as an attempt at closure, either successful or not.

But what if burying means forgetting something we want to remember?

In our next story, we investigate one artist's perspective on what happens when a government tries to erase the history of an entire nation.

After the Iran-Iraq War and the seizure of the Pahlavi Dynasty, much of Iran's history was buried by the government.

We grew up in schools that try to brainwash us.

I was born during the Iraq-Iran War, a war that was imposed on Iran, and it was supported by many Western countries, including the US.

Barba Ghoshiri is an artist from Tehran.

He grew up under the influence of the Islamic Revolution.

His father, Hoshang Ghoshiri, was a famous author and an integral part of the Iranian intellectual community, a community that sought to preserve the culture and history erased by the Revolution.

You are at risk.

I mean, you risk everything.

You are threatened all the time, and they even tried to assassinate my father a couple of times.

And he was on the very top of the list of assassinations during the serial killings of Iranian intellectuals.

Growing up, he was constantly surrounded by the omnipresent effort to preserve the history that defined his father's network of artists, authors and intellectuals.

This environment deeply shaped his artistic pursuits, even from a young age.

The first thing that I published was a caricature, a cartoon, to be precise, of an assassinated person.

I was 12 when it got published.

This I drew the very week that Ahmed Mir Eilayi, who was a great translator, a very good friend of my father's, was assassinated.

Since the age of 12, Ghoshiri has continued to challenge a political oppression by the Iranian government.

In his newest work, he examines his surprising relationship between cemeteries and art spaces.

One cemetery in particular stands out.

Beysh Zahra is not any cemetery.

A festival is the largest cemetery in Iran.

It's not, as you call it, Iran's past, right?

It's not just that, not just that.

It is a gallery.

It is a showcase.

Ghoshiri sees literal burials as redefining the metaphorical meaning of burying.

Instead of being forgotten, individuals are commemorated within a cemetery by those who continue to celebrate the past.

In Beysh Zahra, for instance, there are perhaps thousands of martyrs of Iran-Iraq war, but you have graves of leftists that were even executed before the revolution by the Shah's regime.

And they did not have proper gravestones during the Shah.

And after the revolution, they put some quite mundane gravestones under graves.

And they are still being systematically vandalized every now and then.

In Golshiri's eyes, this is the true act of burial, to destroy something, so that its history is completely erased.

The state cannot stand proper burial grounds for, let's say, for Baha'is and for those that they systematically executed in the 80s.

Baha'is are a religious minority who were persecuted during the Islamic Revolution.

They do not have proper grave markers.

They don't even have a single sign, and so they sometimes mark them with flowers, with everything, with bricks, with everything they could find.

Golshiri has set out on a quest to preserve the past, much like his father sought to do.

In response to these crimes of vandalism, Golshiri has created his own unique approach to memorializing the dead.

One example is his piece, The Untitled Tomb, which was commissioned by a family whose son's grave was destroyed.

They came to me because they knew that I make grave markers for people who cannot have proper grave markers, and they said that whatever they've put on that man's grave had been systematically, again systematically, vandalized or destroyed or removed.

They put the stencil, which is in two parts, on the grave and they pour soot powder on it.

Then you have an imprint of a text that narrates the story of this man's death and his killing to be precise.

And so they didn't know the exact spot of his, they didn't know the exact which grave it was, they didn't know the exact spot of his grave.

And so in that particular plot, there are many graves that are not adorned.

And so you could put that stencil everywhere.

So his actual grave was of no use because they couldn't even find it.

This tombstone he created was originally for one man, but it became a symbol for all those who were erased.

Burying, not just burying, but adding something to that, of erecting something.

But erecting what?

Erecting something out of stone or erecting something out of wax, out of tallow, out of something that you really feel is quite perishable.

But remembrance is something else.

Remembrance does not need a corpse.

That's why you have cenotaphs.

That's why you have memorials.

They don't have corpses.

They don't need corpses.

Golshiri continues to create art that commemorates those who are at risk of being forgotten.

Like his father and other Iranian intellectuals, he refuses to let the government erase those who defined Iran's culture and history.

Golshiri's art is a political statement, reminding us that you can never erase the past and that remembrance will always prevail.

A memorial could be erected in a square, not in a cemetery.

It could be an urban project.

It could be many things, but a cemetery is a cemetery, and you have to treat it as such, but change it, because societies change, but cemeteries are quite slow in that, because death is not something that people want to play with.

But it's my job to do that.

Thank you.

That story was produced by Katie Lan.

It featured music by Olly Reza Farraxadi and Pottington Bear.

In our next story, we travel to the depths of the ocean with Kate Nelson to ask what is buried just beyond our grasp.

We know more about the surface of Mars than we know about our own ocean floor.

We know Mars to a resolution of five meters, maybe 10 meters.

We know our own planet to a resolution in the kilometers.

Janet Voight is a curator of invertebrate zoology at Chicago's Field Museum.

Her invertebrates of choice are benthic octopuses, the kind of octopuses that live at the bottom of the ocean.

There were octopuses sitting around her office staring at us from large glass jars.

But before they end up on her desk, she and her colleagues have to collect them.

What I do whenever possible is go to sea on big ships.

Big ships are so much nicer than little ships.

Her first journey to the deep sea was 20 years ago.

Take me, you know, I'm experienced, you know, I can do this, I won't puke in new shoes.

You know, I tend not to get seasick.

Dr.

Voigt goes on dives in Elvin, a US.

Navy submersible that takes people down to the deep sea.

Imagine a large metal ball with thrusters and arms and scientists stuffed inside.

Because some people don't even like elevators, you know.

Well imagine being in a seven-foot diameter sphere with two other full-grown people.

I mean, I never have had time with anybody petite.

And I'm six feet tall.

Elvin carries three people, two observers or scientists and a pilot.

He drives, he operates the manipulator arms, which can pick things up from the bottom and put them on a box on Elvin's front porch essentially.

Each dive is an opportunity to bring back specimens to add to the museum's collection.

But each dive is also an adventure in and of itself.

Then you climb down a ladder and you sit in this sphere that's seven, seven and a half foot in diameter.

And you crawl down, they pull the ladder up, and then they seal the hatch.

It's not a simple task.

They lower the hatch and they bolt it from the outside.

Why are they bolting this?

I'm going to be on the bottom of the ocean where the pressure per cubic inch is going to be in the tons.

And that's the point where you kind of go, I guess there's no getting out of this.

And then the ship slowly lowers Alvin into the water.

And you look out the viewport, and it's like, oh, I'm in the water.

And before you know it, you're starting to sink, and it's getting dark.

The deep sea is cold.

It's like the inside of your refrigerator.

You're sitting there with three people breathing.

In a mental sphere, the moisture in your breath condenses on the walls and runs down and pulls up on the floor.

It's cold, it's damp, and it's crowded, and it's wonderful.

And as you go deeper through the sunlit waters into the twilight zone, you start to see more and more bioluminescence.

Of course, as Alvin's sinking, you're conserving battery power so it's dark.

And you're like, seeing all these lights, you tell a pilot, pilot, you have to turn on the lights.

I've got to see what's out there.

So he flashes the lights, and when the light flashes, you don't see anything at all.

But when the light goes down, it goes out.

All the bioluminescent creatures flash in response.

It's just, it's amazing.

There's a trade-off in our attempt to find these buried biological treasures.

We seal ourselves in metal spheres and go to great depths.

We kill and collect what we find.

This is what it takes to begin to discover just a little bit more about our ocean.

Elvin's our best resource to get into the bottom of the ocean.

There's a whole bunch of stuff out there that we've never seen.

In the meantime, scientists from around the world can study what Dr.

Voigt and Elvin have brought back.

The specimens that I go out and collect, the animals I kill, I want to be preserved forever, because that's the only thing that makes it appropriate.

That's why depositing things here in the collection means that even if it was a bad thing to have done, it's going to be here for as long as we can, and hopefully that's forever.

Although our scientific wonder often turns towards outer space, scientists like Dr.

Voigt have remained focused on our planet.

The specimens she collects give us just a glimpse of our own ocean floor.

We talk about the deep sea as the final frontier on Earth.

I mean, it's 70% almost of the planet, but it's that three-dimensional realm between the bottom and the top where we just pass through.

That's the final frontier.

That story was produced by Kate Nelson.

It featured music by Pottington Bear, Deif and Chris Zabriskie.

Less than halfway through her time here at Stanford, our producer Yue Li is searching for the perfect item to represent her time at this school.

In two short years, she'll cover this object beneath solid ground in the school's main quad.

We are putting in a picture of seven of us from this year holding the Stanford 16 sign.

We just wrote a letter to the future.

I put in a Giants ticket from two nights ago.

These are the voices of Stanford's Class of 2016 who are moving on to the next chapter of their lives.

Their stories and memories are told through the trinkets collected over the years.

But these are only a fraction of the memories locked underneath Stanford's campus.

The first class, 1895, they decided to paint in red all over campus their class numerals.

But Jane Stanford did not think this was a great idea.

So they came up with the concept of those class plaques.

The tradition was born.

I'm Leslie Winnick.

Leslie has been in charge of the time capsules for the past twenty years.

I put in a friendship bracelet.

My dad told me back in the 70s, people would throw the ID card in as they were lowering it down.

It's a picture of us and then on the back.

We wrote a description of our friendship and what 2016 looks like and what we want for the rest of our lives, who we want to be.

I put in a copy of the program of the theater production that I produced last year as a junior.

I'm putting in my fanny pack.

It's kind of like tattered and broken and I'm not going to wear it again, but it's seen some good times.

It's one of those things that I feel like I can't really wear off of campus, but I can be silly and goofy on campus.

Campus is always alive and bustling.

Sometimes it can move so fast that it's hard to keep up.

In some ways, everything is about right now.

But the time capsules are different.

There's something sort of perfect about the quiet of something being buried, and they bury an item in the time capsule.

A tiny piece of them is just safe here at Stanford.

I slowly start walking across the class plaques outside Memorial Church.

Who were these people, and what were they like?

I want to open these plaques and let the stories out.

I finally reach an unmarked tile where my class plaque will be.

2019.

My senior year feels far away, but I am looking forward to leaving something of me behind.

And that little piece of Yui will remain here, safe on campus.

Or not.

As we've learned over the course of this hour, items and ideas might not always stay buried.

Someday, another Stanford student might find that memento, might wonder who left it.

It's impossible to be sure.

For the Stanford Storytelling Project, this is State of the Human.

Today's program was produced by Eileen Williams, Christy Hartman, Jake Warga, Jenny March and Jonah Willihnganz.

Special thanks to Naveen Qasimali, Sochi Rain Rd's Longstaff, Noelle Li Syn Chow, Janet Voight, Barbad Golshiri, Magellan Pfluke and the staff of Pet's Rest Cemetery.

Thanks also to Sofi Filipa, Charlie Gibson, Ben Cady, Ivy Sanders Schneider, Jackie Langelier, Kim McElwee, Marlon Itunes, Skye Mooney, Tudi Roche, Chris Gerben, Caroline Spears and Stephen Aman.

Music you heard during the introduction and transitions on this show includes work by David Sisseste and Pottington Bear.

For their generous financial support, we'd like to thank the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, Stanford Continuing Studies, the Program and Oral Communication, and Bruce Braden.

Remember that you can find this and every episode of State of the Human on iTunes.

You can also download them and find out more about the Storytelling Project's live events, grants, and workshops at our website, storytelling.stanford.edu.