Architectural historian Peter Gray had one final wish before he died

We all want to leave something behind when we go. The architectural historian Christopher Gray, who died this month, at the age of sixty-six, left a richer legacy than most. There is the Office of Metropolitan History, the business he founded, which is dedicated to digging up blueprints for old New York City buildings. And there’s the nearly thirty years’ worth of “Streetscape” columns he wrote for the Times, which chronicled the city’s unheralded architectural treasures.

But Gray had one more bequest. Just before he died, suddenly, from complications from pneumonia, his lawyer alerted his family to an e-mail he’d sent to his alma mater, St. Paul’s School, in Concord, New Hampshire: “It is my wish, when I die, that my skeleton be flensed (don’t ask!) and articulated and given to a worthy institution not entirely embarrassed by its connection with me, for display in the science lab.” To sweeten the deal, Gray made a financial pledge to the school, effective “only if you accept and take delivery of my skeleton . . . and agree to leave it on display for . . . 10 years? Or until it gets stolen by the Sixth Form”—the senior class—“whichever comes first.” The school had agreed.

The request took Gray’s wife, Erin, by surprise. “This was a relatively new thought of his,” she said. Nevertheless, the family wanted to honor his wish. Which left them with an awkward question, in their grief: How do you turn a loved one into a skeleton?

Gray’s son Peter took the lead. (“We’re nature people. We’re science people,” he said of his family. “We rejected the cultural associations of skeletons and bones with death as petty.”) He called the outfit his father had suggested: Skulls Unlimited International, Inc., in Oklahoma City, which provides skull-cleaning services, mostly to hunters. Skulls Unlimited turned him down. An employee there, Terrisha Harris, explained, “We actually do clean human remains,” but only for medical institutions. “Otherwise, you’d have people putting Nana on the couch in the living room.” Peter Gray got a similar response from various “body farms,” outdoor research facilities where forensic anthropologists study decomposition. Sam Houston State University, in Texas, accepts bodies for donation, but will not return the bones. The forensic-anthropology center at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has a similar policy, although it will occasionally “skeletonize” remains for institutions with which it has a relationship, like the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. ...