The foot was just another one of those things from childhood that you never really think about.
I knew it was weird, of course—not every family has a mummified human foot displayed in their living room—but I never considered it as much more than an oddity.
That is, until the other morning, driving back from daycare drop-off, when I tuned into an NPR piece on how the Natural History Museum had committed to repatriating the thousands of human remains in its collection.
I gasped.
The foot.
Now, there’s really no explaining the foot in a factual way—the best I can do is offer the mythical Coe family version that I know:
My great-great-grandfather was something of a notable New Yorker—board member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that sort of thing. Think: wealthy white man in the Gilded Age. You know.
The story I heard is that an acquaintance—with some connection to the Natural History Museum—had gifted him a mummified foot.
Allegedly, the foot had fallen off the mummified remains of an “Indian princess,” as workers were transferring the body into the museum.
And what better gag gift than a mummified foot?
Like I said, childhood stories have a way of avoiding the thinking that we develop later in life.
As I type this out, I have to wince at both the outlandishness of it as well as my own family’s fallibility in holding onto this foot for generations.
It suddenly seemed obvious: we had to do something about the foot.
I called my dad, who likewise winced at the new context—our oddball family relic turned, or rather re-turned, into what it is: human remains.
We agreed that something needed to be done—the foot had to end its run as a Coe family oddity and be what it’s always been: a piece of human remains.
Taylor Coe 