Every day was pretty much like every other day. They were each so singularly pointless and gray. And here I was, again, in the garage rooting around for gasoline—I could smell it, but I couldn’t quite see the jug’s noxious red outline among the myriad paint cans and weed killers in the dark recesses of our garage’s cob-webbed corners. Nearly every day I went through the motion (whether in earnest or not) of looking for the gasoline can here, to remind myself of the task that lay ahead (and behind, and immediately before, too). The whole garage reeked of it, a carboniferous odor that suggested visions of gas stations draped in harsh yellow light, in full view of bright and shifting calculations—those most obvious signs of our collective instability, and mine as well. But I had made the effort, the only thing that could possibly count anyway, and now I could hear my children arguing in the living room—the innocent narcissism of childhood inflamed, and now inflaming some pointless disagreement. My head throbbed with the sort of empty fatigue that sleep could never cure. Sighing, just to hear myself, as if to convince myself of my own reality, I stepped back from the dark corner of the garage. Walking back into the house, all full of light and arrhythmic noise, it took all the will I could muster not to run right back to my bedroom, close the blinds, and collapse in the general direction of my bed. But there was work to do (there was always work to do), and although I was a nearly empty human being, I had made certain commitments that I held as sacred, that were sacred—for they had to be.
My oldest, Ryan, was inflicting his unbending will on Matthew and Rose again. Ryan, newly ordained a deacon, had all the self-confidence and brash righteousness that his father once had. Totally assured of this righteousness, he efficiently set about to care for his siblings with all of the tact of a pre-teen. Matthew never wanted to work on homework or read, both being activities Ryan fulfilled with near-religious fervor. Little Matthew was soft-spoken and with some difficulty could be corralled into Ryan-approved activities, but every so often his easy-going demeanor would slip away and he would scream at Matthew and inflict his bottled up agony on him. Then Ryan would cry, and then, just like clock-work, Ryan would, in tight-lipped indignation, quietly but firmly tell Matthew just how much he had hurt him, and then Rose would cry. It was all very sad and tragic and cute—and it happened nearly every week. It was always my job, at the end of these highly predictable outbursts, to calm everyone’s frazzled nerves. To help them know how loved they were. And I, newly returned from the garage, nearly couldn’t bear it. The smell, real or imagined, of the gasoline still followed me, my very soul seemed to drip with it. I sniffed my light blue sweater quickly, just to make sure I wasn’t imagining things, before I strode into the living room to “make things right.” A post-fight chill was very much in the air and I went into the nearly codified, upper-middle class ‘mommy-mode’ as I circled the room hugging and whispering to each frantic little body. Usually at this point the feeling of emptiness would dissipate. The soft touch of my children would quiet and soothe me, as I tried to quiet and soothe them. And it almost worked like that again—until Ryan looked at me from his authoritative perch on the recliner, and calmly, almost smugly, suggested (but secretly seemed to command) that we say a family prayer.
There were certain motions that were sometimes impossibly difficult for me—and one of these was family prayer. To pray with a heart on fire, to audibly will myself to be better, to be holy, just for these children—at least—only served to remind me of my defects. My doubting mind, my rebellious heart, my vacant soul, my silent husband. And all of these deficiencies, freshly re-emblazoned on my mind—a personal scarlet letter, visible only to me and my God—led me, always, back to a frantic type of discipleship that ultimately only seemed to burn myself away. So there were times that I stopped—almost everything. Times I couldn’t bear to say a single prayer or read one verse from the Bible or Book of Mormon. Times that I went to church just to have some time away from my life, and this interior of mausoleum white. But Ryan, though a deacon, was High Priest of the Happily Orthodox. He was so sure of himself that I was never sure we were praying to the same God. Ryan’s God was all peace and comfort—my own God seemed vengeful and puritanical. Ryan’s God left you alone most weekdays. Mine tormented me all week long.
So we said the family prayer—Ryan praying, as was the custom. In his pre-adolescent-ly cracking, but innocently wise, voice, he thanked “Our Father in Heaven” for the “many blessings bestowed upon us.” What these blessings were I wasn’t quite sure—but Ryan’s voice seemed so thankful that I was sure he couldn't be inventing things. After the prayer we hugged and everyone returned to their corner of the living room. It was these moments of peace and quiet, as irregular as they might be, that most frightened me. In these moments, where a parallel peace and quiet should naturally permeate my mind, instead a sort of stale air felt trapped. The sort of stale air that in a sort of natural fermentation produced a sense of foreboding of the very worst in the most banal sort of way. And it was precisely in times like these that I hung onto my religion to counteract the vertigo of despair. It felt as if my species of discipleship was called into being by the sort of existential angst that suburban life hid so well that it could only seep out when everything seemed too good to be true. There were many times that such intuitions came upon me, but nothing revealed the strip malls to be Potemkin villages like a good day.
And it was at a time like this, four years ago, that I saw the purest form of this style of discipleship. And it was for times like these that I had claimed my own sainthood—a commitment a little over two years old.
This discovery occurred while watching a documentary on the Vietnam War with Thomas, shortly after I had discovered his secret. It was an especially dark and particularly stilted time, as any time spent close to him at that point was prone to be. Sitting alone with him in our newly-finished basement—while our kids drifted away upstairs—was, in a way I suppose, a metaphorical encounter with what physicists call “heat death.” Heat death being the point at which the universe can no longer sustain work, the point at which stars can no longer form, and the point at which things grind to (what I imagine as) a long and shuddering stop.
In this moment, like many times since, I felt compelled to the religion of my birth out of sheer desperation, a compulsion barely distinguishable from some nervous mania. It was a way to cling desperately to an idealized vision—of myself and my family—with which I would often self-flagellate. In this way any emptiness was my fault, any pain was my own creation, and any doubt stemmed directly from personal weakness. And it was in this moment of intense suffering paired immaculately with intense belief, or desire toward belief, that I saw a vision of both what I felt inside, and what I hoped to make self-evident. A flaming symbol of my inner turmoil. And what I saw was terrifying and disturbing—but also liberating. In grainy black-and-white, while I sat in shocked and sacred silence, I watched a Vietnamese Buddhist monk set himself on fire. The flames whipped at his body, inexorably melting him away. It was by turns both horrific and mesmerizing. Such bravery and such agony, and such life in the very moment of its intentional extinguishing. Though Schopenhauer wrote of sentient beings’ “will to live,” here was a human being who wasn’t simply ignoring this thorn in our mortal flesh, but actually intentionally treading that bitter path of suffering and self-destruction.
His “will to live” was superseded by something higher and nobler—even to his own consummation. And it was at that moment that I decided to pursue this sort of darkly heroic self-martyrdom. At first it was simply a lazy fantasy that I could indulge while laying in bed late at night next to my husband’s dark and disconnected form. Often I couldn’t tell when he had drifted off to sleep in the all-encompassing gloom of our master bedroom. It was as if we were trapped within different rooms, as if our king-sized bed were a tangible gloaming, an inescapable plush parallelogram of extinction. If anything could wake me up before the Febreze-scented night dissolved me away, it would have to be the white hot flame whipping at my tired body. Finally my husband would look at me and come face-to-face with my pain. Even if such fantasies constituted a sort of suburban House of Usher, I was convinced that just the conjuring up of these dark images would bring some small catharsis to my soul. For the first few months it stayed this way—a fantasy to be indulged in during particularly trying times. But then, slowly, my thinking evolved. Why couldn’t I establish my existence, re-emblazon my discipleship in literal fire, too? My soul, alternating between a despondent emptiness and a painfully zealous discipleship (aimed at displacing the emptiness, but in reality merely being fed by the emptiness, the lack of substance to my soul, the anxiety of a nearly groundless existence) longed for a release.
In the first blank page of my triple combination I wrote on the ultra-thin paper in blotchy black ink (which bled through nearly perfectly to the other side), “our whole lives we must resist the myth of culmination.” I first thought that in a time of great despondency, right after I discovered Thomas’ secret—a betraying and destabilizing secret open for me to see on the laptop he forgot to close. In the four years since that discovery we had discussed his secret exactly once—the morning after I found out. And in the intervening years of countless despondent days and suffocating nights, this great and mostly unspeakable secret of our marriage ate at it like the night melts the light in inevitable twilight. I longed for something more, just like Thomas longed for something (or someone) more than me. Our whole lives may be a series of iterations and recalibrations, of disappointments and resignations, of dislocations and alienations. This may be true—but nothing prepares you for that ultimate reality-shifting and nauseating revelation that the one closest to you, the same one who knows you best, may also like you least. And this, in turn, fed the raw anger and hatred that I’ve come to harbor towards Thomas. If the flames weren’t an acceptable offering to my God, and if they didn’t summon feelings of loss and belated love in my husband, at least they might terrorize him. The only thing that prevented me from consummating this terrible marriage of existential emptiness, religious revival, and marital misery in holy fire was my love for my three children. My hell purchased their heaven. Or maybe not quite heaven. But surely something decidedly non-hellish. Ryan, Matthew, and Rose were a trinity of hope—a God of immanence. They were decidedly not an easy God, as any parent of young children will tell you, and they could be angry and vindictive Gods at times. I was entwined in their emotions, and our beings—though distinct—acknowledged this deep connection. The word was made flesh.
But I knew no one could serve two masters. I knew I had to pick, to quit vacillating between the poles of my existence. The earthly god or the ethereal one. The one that separated Legos, or the one that separated light from dark. Of course, I knew either decision would transform my life (or end it) and could shatter my children’s not-quite-formed lives. But consequences are inevitable. For continuing to live in a house that sometimes resembled an air-conditioned tomb was an audacious decision as well.
So one night, just after midnight, I slipped down the stairs that led from the master bedroom to the living room. Down a wood-floored hall, on the other side of a bathroom, was a small alcove leading to the garage door. As I opened the door, and stepped quietly across the threshold, I flipped on the garage lights then stepped gingerly down the wooden steps to the cement floor. There in the corner was the red gasoline jug. I didn’t know exactly how to start, though I had a box of matches in the pocket of my sweatpants.
But suddenly I could foresee how the blaze would continue. It would consume our minivan, our house, my husband, and children. In a single moment I could see the image of our charred and burned out house—the plastic siding that remained now twisted and black at points, speckled with a sick yellow. The car tires melted in the garage—the metallic skeleton of the vehicle brought low to the rubble-strewn concrete floor.
But what was there to do? My throat tightened, I found myself in the quick-enclosing iron cage of my mind. My feet traced the pebble-like outlines pushed into the cement while I considered my limited options. I was both exhausted and flooded with primal energy. In that moment I discovered the vanity in wanting to be a martyr. I longed for the finality, the clarity, of these awe-inspiring and fearful enactments of devotion that I grew up learning about. The treks in the snow barefoot, the exile on remote islands, the wading through frozen rivers. Those lives were easier to trace, to worship, than whatever was happening in my life. A slow heat always returned to my face, a mixture of humiliation and indignation, when I thought about the gap between my intentions for my life and the few first steps in that direction, and whatever was happening now. And no matter what I did, I could see that I still lived in the thrall of the myth of culmination.
But I was also beginning to realize that this life itself was a slow-motion martyrdom as I burned myself away through frantic religiosity while sacrificing my dreams for a perfect marriage, and hoped that perhaps the smoke would be pleasing to my God. For my God was a vengeful God—and I had resigned myself to that fact. So I walked over to the gas can reverently and determinedly, picked it up with some difficulty, tipped it over a bit onto the garage floor, and placed the can back down before bending down to the puddle and swiping my finger through it slowly and solemnly. Then I walked confidently over to the garage door and, extending myself fully, placed my gasoline-wetted finger on the lintel of the door. There was my sacrifice.
Since then, I have thought long and hard about that night. I have often hoped that the destroying angel would receive some satisfaction in his work as I submitted myself to it, for a life of martyrdom needn’t be extinguished in a mess of flames and petroleum—no blood must be shed. And it was then I came to believe that it is better for the holy fire of my gradual apocalypse whip around me until the day I die a natural death.
And there I claimed my sainthood—mine also could be a less visible but no less real discipleship of self-immolation. Though nobody else would know, I could smell the smoke. For right now, as I look out the window to the car-strewn road of our leafy suburb, I can feel myself on fire.