Not long ago Jimmy Carter died. The former president's body was put in a box and transported hither and yon, including temporary storage in the rotunda of the US Capitol, with the intent of honoring the man who had previously been using it.
All I could think was, How silly. How does trucking a dead body up and down the east coast of North America honor to anybody? In actual reality it isn't the shuffling of the body but the conformance to tradition: Citizens parading through the Capitol are a way of declaring to each other, "I remember something about Jimmy Carter's role and place in American society and so do you." We are united with each other and with the person who formerly lived in that body by the overlap of those memories.
We could certainly have performed different acts to make those declarations but by doing the same things for Jimmy Carter as were done for previous presidents we declare that his life and service to the nation are somewhat the same -- in office, in honor, in touching the lives of other citizens -- even while being distinct in specific actions, opinions, and relationships.
Still, if it were me that people were trying to remember I would rather have them parading through the capitol in such a way that they looped back and looked at each other instead of at a box. What is in the box is no longer of value. The people who are walking past are.
We do the same thing with houses previously occupied by people we want to remember. I visited Mount Vernon once and you know it is just a house. (I do however remember the grape vines in the garden.) I visited the Roi-Porlier-Tank Cottage more than once and it too is just a house. Neither of those houses are currently being used to house the homeless so their only functions consist in memory and imagination. One might argue those services are a limited and impoverished role. Yet the actual reality is that children and grandparents and adolescents parade through the building and grounds -- and they see each other honoring and remembering.
I do not know whether that is what Nils Otto Tank would have wanted. I rather think it might be the future Caroline Louise Albertina (van der Meulen) Tank would have chosen for her house. In any case, this is what we who are alive now have chosen as the way to be together with each other and to hold some continuity with our past. In actual reality their posterity have made up our own minds on how to honor the Tanks, the Washingtons, the Carters, and each other.