SEATTLE — The frozen human head arrived at the laboratory like the others -- by courier, double-bagged with dry ice in a foam-lined box marked "perishable."
The researchers thawed the head and anchored its protruding spine in an acrylic mold. They slid a fighter pilot's helmet over the head and tightened the chin strap. With the head wrapped in pantyhose, nobody had to look at the face.
The test -- a neck injury study for the Air Force -- was about to begin.
Randal Ching, the biomechanical engineer in charge, didn't dwell much on the specimens that came to him at the University of Washington. They were tools in the incremental march of science, costly and sometimes hard to find. He didn't need to know where they came from or the long journeys that scattered them across the country.
This head had traveled far.
It belonged to 51-year-old Michael Palmore of Searcy, Ark.
This is the story of his afterlife.
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Inside the Cloverdale Church of Christ in Searcy, Michael Palmore, a husky man with thick silver hair, was speaking to the congregation on a favorite topic: how science and religion could inform each other.
He flipped to the next PowerPoint slide: a picture of a brain.
"This brain here is probably an 80-year-old brain," said Palmore, a family therapist. "You see how it looks more like hamburger meat that's freshly ground in the container? It's not very nice, but it's what it looks like."
As a speaker at the church last spring, he lamented that more researchers did not study the brain. It was the seat of the soul.
The body itself meant little. He had long ago told his wife, Patsy, and their three children that he wanted to be cremated, his ashes stored in a coffee tin.
Palmore was a plain-spoken and independent man. He painted houses and worked as a security guard to support his family while he studied to be a therapist. It was a calling he found later in life, after more than 10 years as an assistant store manager for Wal-Mart in Arkansas, Texas and Mississippi.
His children were grown. He and Patsy had recently bought a house in Searcy. He loved his work.
Then the trouble started. Palmore experienced night fevers last summer but shrugged them off as allergies. Not until Nov. 7 did doctors diagnose him with pancreatic cancer.
In Little Rock, about an hour southwest of Searcy, surgeons removed his spleen, gallbladder and much of his pancreas. By January, he had shed 50 pounds.
