The bartender in Dawson City dropped the blackened, leathery toe into my glass with a casual flourish. “You can drink it fast, you can drink it slow,” she said, “but the lips have gotta touch the toe.” I looked down at the Sourtoe Cocktail and wondered how my life had arrived here. Six months earlier, I had been kneeling beside my grandmother’s casket, staring at her hands. They were folded too neatly, too finally. I kept trying to burn the image into my brain because some part of me already knew I would never see them again. That is how this started. Not with a love of the macabre, but with a quiet panic: the fear that the people we love simply vanish.
I decided to chase the pieces that refuse to disappear.
My first stop was the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Silver Spring, Maryland. I expected a quiet, clinical room. Instead I walked into a collection of 24 million medical instruments and anatomical specimens. There were child skeletons arranged by developmental stage, the mummified head and shoulders of a 19th-century girl, and the unusual skull of a Civil War soldier shot across the top of his head. And then, in a small case, fragments of Abraham Lincoln’s skull with strands of hair still attached. I stood there longer than I care to admit. This was not a monument. It was a sliver of a man who signed proclamations, told jokes, worried about his sons, and lost sleep over a divided nation. Reduced to bone and hair, he still commanded reverence. It felt unfair and beautiful at the same time.
In Philadelphia, the Mütter Museum pushed the idea further. The walls held 2,000 objects removed from people’s throats, the skeleton of a man who stood seven feet six inches tall, and, most hauntingly, slivers of Albert Einstein’s brain mounted across 46 microscope slides. I had always thought of Einstein as a concept, a word that means genius. Seeing his tissue turned him back into tissue—into someone who had a body, who aged, who died. Some visitors looked for the secret of his intelligence in those slides. I looked for evidence that even the brightest mind among us was still, in the end, breakable. The museum did not feel like a cabinet of curiosities. It felt like a library of human limitation, each jar answering a question I had never said out loud: If we are so fragile, how do we still matter so much?
The farther I traveled, the more I realized that every preserved part carried a human motive as clearly as a fingerprint. In Lisbon, the preserved head of Diogo Alves—Portugal’s first serial killer and one of its last men hanged—bobs past unconcerned medical students in the University of Lisbon. His head was kept because 19th-century phrenologists believed the shape of his skull could explain evil. It cannot, of course. But the jar remains, a warning dressed as science. In Padua, Italy, the atmosphere shifted. St. Anthony’s tongue rests in an ornate gold reliquary, the only part of his body that did not decompose after he died in 1231. The man spent his life preaching across France and Italy, and somehow his voice outlasted the rest of him. I felt an unexpected tenderness standing before it. This was not horror. This was love trying to hold onto a voice.
Then came Siena, and the moment I did not see coming. St. Catherine’s severed head sits inside the Basilica of San Domenico, smuggled out of Rome in a paper bag by townspeople who refused to let the holy city keep all of her. I read the plaque and laughed at the audacity of it—holy smugglers!—and then I looked up at her face, or what remained of it, and tears came without warning. The Sienese loved her so much they could not bear for her to be whole anywhere else. That is not morbidity. That is devotion. I thought of my grandmother’s hands again, how I had wanted to take something, anything, from that casket to keep her near me. Grief is greedy like that. It wants a souvenir.
In Warsaw, I found another kind of souvenir: Frédéric Chopin’s heart, sealed in a jar beneath Holy Cross Church. His sister smuggled it from Paris to Poland in alcohol, honoring his dying wish. During World War II, the Nazis stole it to wound Polish morale, as if removing a heart could remove a nation’s courage. A heart became a battlefield. In Bar-le-Duc, France, Prince René de Chalon left instructions to be remembered not as a handsome statue but as a rotting corpse, flayed skin and hollow ribs, holding a heart-shaped reliquary that once contained his own shriveled heart. He wanted no sugarcoating. Standing before it, I found myself nodding. We spend so much energy making death look peaceful. Maybe honesty is the last dignity we can offer the living.
By the time I returned to the Dawson City bar, I understood what the toe meant. Louie Linken lost his frostbitten digit to the Yukon cold; decades later, a captain turned it into a cocktail club initiation. The original toe lasted seven years before someone finally swallowed it. Since then, a whole foot’s worth of donated toes have kept the tradition alive. It is absurd. It is also deeply human. We preserve pieces not because we are obsessed with death, but because we are desperate for continuity. A thumb in salt. A saint’s tongue in gold. A composer’s heart in a church wall. These are bookmarks in the enormous text of being human, reminders that someone was here, that their story mattered, that not all of them has to go.
I went home and opened the box of my grandmother’s things. I kept her thimble. It is not holy. It will never be in a museum. But it fits the shape of her work, and that is enough. I no longer fear what remains. One day I will be a story too, perhaps a few cells on a slide, perhaps nothing at all. But for now I am here, whole and temporary, and the small things I leave behind will have to speak for me. The dead do not haunt us in pieces. They visit us in the objects we cannot bring ourselves to throw away.
