Beyond the Glass

The essay traces a visit to the Mütter Museum and, in particular, the Hyrtl Skull Collection - 139 skulls displayed in a towering cherrywood cabinet, each mounted on wire frames above balsa boxes and lit to face every arriving visitor. It describes the museum’s uneasy mix of 19th‑century medical pedagogy and contemporary spectacle: teratological jars, a large case of tsantsa (shrunken heads) with braided hair and sewn eyelids, and wall text that admits many skulls were acquired by grave robbing and bought by the College of Physicians in 1873. The museum markets curiosity - “disturbingly informative” - while prompting questions about provenance, exploitation, and how collections built on violence are presented to the public.

Against that cabinet of anonymous dead, a personal narrative unfolds: the narrator goes to the museum for work, then receives a call from an aunt that his estranged mother had been murdered and her body dumped a month earlier. He documents the shock - three days of immobilizing grief, a birthday hike that tries to pull him back into life, small betrayals of laughter, and the steady presence of a boyfriend and friends as he travels for multiple memorials and delivers a eulogy. The piece links museum spectacles and contested remains to the daily business of mourning, showing how a grieving son learns to continue living in a world that keeps going.