In Manhattan, if you know where to look, you can find the dead still waiting.

McSorley's Old Ale House sits at 15 East 7th Street in the East Village, a squat red-brick survivor from before the Civil War. The sawdust on the floor is refreshed daily. The menu offers two choices: light ale or dark. Most first-time visitors miss the most important artifacts in the room. They hang above the bar, on a rod connecting two old gas lamps: roughly two dozen wishbones, some over a century old, coated in accumulated dust.

The story, as the bartenders tell it: During World War I, young men from the neighborhood would come for a final turkey dinner before shipping out. After the meal, they’d hang up a wishbone alongside a friend—a promise, a placeholder, a way of saying I'll be back to finish this. The bones still hanging are the ones whose owners never returned.

Whether this story is entirely true is a matter of some dispute. Joseph Mitchell, the legendary New Yorker chronicler, reported in 1940 that the owner simply had a passion for saving memorabilia—including wishbones from holiday turkeys. No soldiers, no promises. And there's the awkward detail that John McSorley died in 1910, four years before the war began.

But Matthew Maher, who worked at McSorley's for decades and eventually became its owner, insisted on the soldier story until his death in 2020. His daughter Teresa, who runs the bar now, tells the same tale.

I don't know which version is true. And here is what I find remarkable: it doesn't entirely matter. What matters is that we need the story of the soldiers. A man who collected holiday wishbones is a quirky footnote. Young men who hung their hopes on a gas lamp before marching off to die in the mud of the Somme—that is something else entirely.

In 2011, the New York City health department demanded the wishbones be cleaned. They had accumulated nearly a century of dust—"stalactites," one contemporary called them, which is exactly the kind of description that makes health inspectors reach for their citation pads. Matthew Maher refused to let anyone else touch them. So he came in alone at three in the morning, took each bone down one by one, dusted them carefully, and swept the fallen dust into a container.

He took that dust home with him to Queens, where he kept it.

This detail stops me cold every time I think about it.

The dust. He kept the dust. The residue of time itself, the accumulated particles of a century of smoke and breath and waiting. He boxed it up like a relic and carried it home on the subway, a man in his seventies cradling a container of sacred dirt through the tunnels of New York City.

What do you call that? Sentimentality? Reverence? Insanity? Grief for men he never met, dead decades before he was born?

I think you call it listening. Listening to voices that never got to finish.

You likely know this other story, perhaps the most famous example of a voice silenced too soon. On August 1, 1944, a fifteen-year-old girl in Amsterdam sat down to write in her diary. She had been in hiding for over two years. Her entry that day grappled with the contradictions she felt within herself:

"As I've told you many times, I'm split in two. One side contains my exuberant cheerfulness, my flippancy, my joy in life... This side of me is usually lying in wait to ambush the other one, which is much purer, deeper and finer."

She was fifteen, doing what fifteen-year-olds do: trying to figure out who she was, trying to reconcile the self she showed the world with the self she felt inside.

Three days later, the Gestapo raided the annex. Anne Frank and her family were arrested and deported. She died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen in early 1945, weeks before liberation.

Her diary ends with a suddenness that haunts us all. She never got to finish working out who she was.

Now, we are trained to value completion. Finish what you start. Tie up loose ends. But the fact is, the incomplete often carries a weight the finished never could, certainly so if the work was taken from the author’s hands.

Anne Frank's diary is powerful partly because it ends abruptly. She is frozen forever at fifteen, mid-becoming. If she had survived, published her diary at fifty or sixty, it would be a different book—a finished book, with perspective and distance.

But it would not be this book. It would not have the unbearable weight of a voice quieted prematurely by evil.

The wishbones work the same way. A broken wishbone is just garbage. But an unbroken wishbone, hanging for a century, waiting for someone who will never return—that's a promise left open. A conversation never concluded. A presence made more vivid by its absence.

I think about this when I catch myself putting off the phone call, the letter, the conversation I've been meaning to have. I'll get to it later, I tell myself. There's time.

Maybe there is. Probably there is. Most of the time, there is.

But the men who hung those wishbones thought they had time too. Anne Frank, writing on August 1st, had every reason to believe she'd write again on August 2nd and 3rd and 4th. The voice that gets interrupted never knows it's about to be interrupted.

We walk around assuming we'll get to finish our sentences. We treat our relationships as though they have infinite runway, as though the people we love will always be there to hear what we've been meaning to tell them.

Sometimes they are. And sometimes you find yourself staring at a wishbone coated in century-old dust, thinking about all the sentences that never got finished.

Matthew Maher died in January 2020, just before the pandemic closed the bars. His daughter Teresa runs McSorley's now. The wishbones still hang above the bar, re-coated in a decade's worth of new dust.

I don't know what happened to the dust he took home to Queens. Maybe it's still there, in a box in a closet.

Maybe it got thrown out in the confusion of grief—the way so many artifacts do, the things that meant everything to one person and nothing to anyone else.

It was just dust. It was nothing—and it was everything.

The people around you are still speaking. The voices you love are still mid-sentence, still working out who they are, still waiting to tell you things they haven't told you yet.

It is a sober truth, but some voices simply don't get to finish. When they stop, what remains will have to be enough, so we ought to listen closely.

John

The Mayfly Letter has no algorithms, no investors—just my wife and me folding newspapers at a kitchen table.

We're a small-batch operation built on the support of readers who have signed up to receive our handsome print edition— four essays, inked on premium English newsprint and sent to your doorstep every month.

If you're the kind of person who loves the feeling of picking up a real newspaper with your morning coffee, something you can underline and leave out for others to find, we'd love to have you as a print subscriber.

It’s the best way to support our independent writing.

Either way, thanks for being here.

John Conrad