Then, he announces that the next stop will be “the church,” and the tour starts walking. My roommate is tired, I know, but I ask if we can please follow them just one more stop. I’ve had my eye out for the church where Jimmy’s funeral was held all weekend, and I haven’t seen it yet. It’s what feels like one final piece of the puzzle, one final location where I might learn something about Jimmy’s life and his death, and about why people still care. He agrees, and we follow the tour, which is made up of a Fellini-esque cast of now-familiar people I’ve seen around Fairmount all weekend — some of the judges from the competition and some of the lookalikes, who are now half-out of costume; some of the people who were with us last night as we stared up at the ruins of Fairmount High School in shock; the woman who sold me the bundle of posters the previous afternoon. Everyone is smiling and laughing and talking to each other jovially, happy to be together, now, here, in this town where He once was.

We reach the Fairmount Friends Meeting Church, and I’m surprised and confused that the sign doesn’t read Back Creek Friends Church, which is what I’ve always read was the location of the funeral. Luckily, that’s the first thing our tour guide addresses. He tells us that, while many biographers name Back Creek as the location of the funeral, the town actually decided to hold it at Fairmount Friends instead, because Fairmount Friends is bigger, and actually in town, whereas Back Creek is a bit farther down the road. “When you see pictures of them carrying the casket down the steps,” he says, “that’s these steps right here.”

He tells us that more than 2,000 people came to Fairmount — a town which normally only has that many residents — to pay their respects to Jimmy. While Marcus Winslow let certain people into the church to make sure those who mattered got to see the ceremony, most people filled the streets around us, as far as the eye could see, to just be near the funeral. “They set up speakers outside the church,” Kinnaman says, “so that people outside could hear what was going on. I’ve had people tell me that the speakers didn’t work; I’ve had people say they could hear everything.” In other words: like so many other things about the James Dean legend, from his sexuality to his upbringing to his either revolutionary or nonexistent acting ability, depending on who you speak to, depending on who it is doing the remembering and the storytelling, the funeral took place both here and there, and to the people outside it was audible and silent, both possibilities — all possibilities — true and false, all at once, and forever more.

Soon, the walking tour moves on, but we stay behind. I stand on the steps and look up at the church, and I think I may have finally realized what it is, precisely, about the James Dean story that continues to fascinate and inspire, several generations after 9/30/1955. I think it’s because James Dean has come to represent the inevitability of death, but also, simultaneously, inextricably, he reminds us of the possibility of immortal life through memory.

Most of us will not have one museum dedicated to our lives, let alone two in the same town. Most of us probably won’t have yearly parades thrown in our honor. Our faces probably won’t be painted on the sides of water towers, and we probably won’t have people fly to our graves from around the world to kiss our headstones. But James Dean’s enduring influence reminds us of our own power to leave our marks on our own little corners of the world. Fairmount’s yearly ritualized remembrance of Jimmie Dean the hometown boy is a way of bringing him back to life, just for a while, to thank him for making them proud. Every time we remember someone, we bring them to life again, if only for a moment.

André Bazin wrote of photography’s powerful, metaphoric resonance residing in its ability to mummify the dead, to preserve a moment that can live on forever, even if its subject is gone. Yes, sixty years ago today, James Dean died a violent, horrific death at the young age of 24. But every time we look at a photograph of James Dean, that one specific moment when he was alive comes back into existence again. Every time we crack open the spine of a new biography to once more re-tell ourselves the story of his life — following him from Marion to Fairmount, to California and back to Fairmount, then back to California, New York, and finally California again — we keep him alive. Every time we press play on Rebel Without a Cause and watch him lay down in the street to care for a little toy monkey, every time we watch him strike oil in Giant or pull a gun on Ronald Reagan in The Dark, Dark Hours, for us he is both alive and dead, and he reminds us of our own mortality, and of our own possibility of transcending death by living life.

“One of these days, I might be able to contribute something to the world,” Jimmy once wrote in a letter to his aunt and uncle, excited about the prospect of embarking on a meaningful career in Hollywood.

Contribute something to the world, indeed.