One Essay
On Either Side
My uncle R finally succeeded in killing himself this past Tuesday.
My uncle R leaves behind three emotionally battered ex-wives. At least four biological children, suffering and starved and scrawny. One neglected so far that the boy was admitted to the hospital to bleed through his pores like Christ in Gethsemane. He will leave behind these children’s children, impoverished and estranged. I don’t know how many there are. My uncle R will be cremated, not because this is the conclusion he desired for his remains, but because it will help the family save $6,000. Between the credit card debt and the car debt and the condo share he has not sold since his first marriage, there is nothing to leave the boys to help them in caring for their father’s ever-continuing line. My uncle R will leave behind eleven to thirteen former stepchildren who will not come to the funeral. Who will not miss him at all. Who might not even be told until years later of his passing, and then they might just sigh gratefully, thinking of the years of terror he inflicted on them in their home.
He dies in a plush armchair in the “family home,” my grandparents’ home, which has been refinanced again, and again, when the business is doing poor, when there is another mouth to feed. The home which always has a child, or grandchild, or family, or three, living in the basement or the office or the spare room. Out front is a wishing well. On the first-floor wall is a collage of photos of children all related by blood. Abused children. I am among them.
When my uncle R finally reaches the end of his dying in his mother and father’s plush armchair, he will suddenly beg for life, experiencing withdrawal, saying he was wrong and maybe he is ready to be helped. And my aunt and mother will pin him down, will tell him: No, you belong in heaven now.
When my uncle R finally dies, due to complications from Crohn’s disease, due to the long abuse of opioid painkillers, due to despair, due to starvation—which is also my preferred form of suicide—his body will rest for hours, face uncovered, eyes unclosed, in the plush armchair next to the juicer where my grandmother peels carrots and pineapples. She has subsisted on them for fifty-odd years. She will wander in and out of the room, her skeleton under her paper-thin skin peeking through. He will rest in the plush armchair where as a child I used to read Joseph Smith’s Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price, and also Robin McKinley’s Beauty and the Beast, and also Bukowski’s Love Is a Dog from Hell. Where I would sit and for days on end watch Glen Beck and reruns of Glen Beck and more Glen Beck, melting into the cracks of the sofa. When my uncle R finally dies it will be in the same chair my grandfather passed in, less than a year before. Both of them now in the next life. These punishing patriarchs, ruling over generations of suffering from the heavens. They are secure in their righteousness, at their place at Christ’s feet.
My mother has asked if I would like to see a photo of my uncle R’s dead body.
I tell her I would not.
There is something I would like to say to my mother about the respect offered in bearing witness. About retreat. About, I don’t know. I increasingly know so little.
My uncle R’s face was gaunt throughout his life. Long with high cheekbones and concave sides, as early as adolescence. After his first marriage to his second-cousin C he developed Crohn’s disease, and this physical affliction and the pain it caused him served as an excuse for my uncle’s escalating abuse against C and their three sons, a cycle which lasted a little over a decade.
My grandparents had seven children, and after my mother gave birth to me halfway through high school, her brothers would sometimes care for me. And, after R was married, C would often care for me. Or, share space with me. My understanding of the word care is not one I associate with this room. I remember C on my grandparents’ green wraparound sofa nursing a child with another on her lap. She must have been very young, with a round face that should have smiled. Pale skin and curly black hair which stood out in a home full of sandy blonde and beige. I remember feeling an affinity for her. She was also quiet and misplaced. I felt myself then to be half child, half grown, and I felt her to be half grown, half child.
When she and my uncle R divorced, the family would condemn her. Her sins. The pain she inflicted on her line.
She will not go to the funeral. She will not speak to anyone who reminds her of that family home.
I keep thinking about her face on the green sofa. The way she would look over her left shoulder, down the home’s long hallways with either longing or fear. I remember many afternoons of watching her watching.
My uncle was once sent into “treatment” by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints—of which all my relatives (except one uncle on my father’s side) are still stalwart members—not for his drug addiction, but for his porn addiction.
In my years of watching porn, I tell myself at first I am only doing research. It’s true that very rarely do the images and sounds I consume on the internet provoke any arousal in me. However, this “research” into power, into degradation, into the vast depravity of the human condition, has been wearing on my soul.
“Don’t worry sweety, I’ll be here while your father fucks you,” is a recommended video. Montage of teens who love it rough. I discover a channel devoted to women in Mormon garments who are forced by their bishop or another priesthood holder to perform sexual acts they have never dreamt of. In the chapel. In a baptismal font.
I admit that after seeing women in dog cones drink piss, or allowing their assholes to serve as cigar stands, I feel these videos and images of women in holy garments embroidered with blessings to be the final perversion that sullies all ties to my youth. In childhood I believed there was a sacredness to submission to the spirit. That as a vessel which the spirit inhabited I was beautiful. That when I love a mortal and allow her or him habitation within my body, when I surrender to them and their desires, I am made perfect by my love, that I in turn am made love. And I believe love is divine.
A poet from Utah who is widely respected for her book about grief and heaven and the socialist underpinnings of Joseph Smith’s city planning visits Philadelphia to read.
On the internet I DM her and ask for an ARC of her book. I say I was born in Provo and have since left the church. I say I am fascinated by the premise of her collection. There has been a persistent growth of “good Mormons,” my phrase, in the cultural sphere. A tolerance of aberrant hateful beliefs marketed as civil. It frightens me.
When the poet sends the PDF to me it is with a small note that says she is still a practicing member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, but she hopes I find something to enjoy in the book anyway. I read it in one afternoon after a day of drinking wine and complaining about politics with the Adorno scholar. After fucking him on his sofa. After leaving him tipsy and mangled.
The poet’s work is brilliant and visceral. She makes me ache and I cry in a cemetary while my dog watches the life crawling amongst the green grass. While the dead lie beneath us. And do not rise. And, I believe, will not rise.
My mother and her five remaining siblings pose at the funeral with arms around one another, smiling. The Mormon funerals I have seen are joyful, are a space to rejoice in the spirit free of suffering and temptation, returned to the heavenly mother and father.
In Lee Chang Dong’s film Secret Sunshine, a woman’s child is murdered and the murderer finds God. In the film he smiles at the grieving mother. At peace. He is not punished with her pain. He is set loose from the chains of guilt and shame by his newly found savior. There is no justice.
When the mother of the murdered child meets with the murderer, he gives her a placid eerily calm stare.
I have seen my cousins bear children through C-Section, one right after the other, and their eyes during the procedure are similarly vacant. One of my cousin’s in particular strikes me, her face devoid of feeling and porcelain, her bright red hair in one perfect braid. It is this space of half death and calm that I have sought through starvation and sex and drinking. Suicide always on the tip of the tongue in pursuit of this absent stare. This nothingness I see in so many of my female relatives. A sedated stupor.
I think maybe my Uncle R will not be missed, not because he was a monster but because the systems within which he exists are incapable of missing him. When you dehumanize half of your population so exquisitely, you say life is not valuable at all, no, not yours either. And when you call someone a monster, it is only because that is what you believe of yourself.
I can easily imagine my uncle at the end of his life, after his move to Arizona in order to stay closer to his second wife, who was able to manage some level of financial security and order despite his abuse. I can imagine him at his job at Kinkos, or watching porn in the shared bathroom, in his lonely apartment, cock in hand standing in the kitchen. Leaning too deep into his physical and emotional pain—thinking only of himself—and praying to Jesus. Secure in the atonement.
Perhaps towards the end my uncle found true peace in his confidence in forgiveness. A peace that none of his wives or children or grandchildren will ever be able to feel.
The thief has autonomy. Those who are robbed merely own the discontent of the ruined. Who are robbed both of their love, and their ability to be loved. Who are robbed, most critically, of their faith.
After the death I go to dinner with a man who has been lashing me since I was nineteen. This night he beats me and bites me in the Sonder, then whips me with a belt, and mocks me for how weak I have become when I do not allow myself to scream, but whimper. How interested in self-preservation I’ve become, when I sniff, blistering from the impacts.
I attended my grandfather’s funeral service over livestream while participating in a Zoom meeting for unionizing higher-ed faculty in the greater Philadelphia area. The attendance at the funeral was much sparser than the attendance of the meeting. Only his and my blood, and mostly under twenty. There was my grandmother, my mother and all six of her siblings, two of their spouses, and an overwhelming sprawl of my grandfather’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren. A battalion of steady saints.
I miss my Uncle R’s funeral’s livestream by miscalculating the time difference between my home of Philadelphia and the Lord’s Chosen People’s home of Provo, UT. But I read his obituary, which my grandmother—mostly lost in early Alzheimer’s—drafted, and which I can see my mother edited because the syntax is hers. In both my grandfather and my uncle’s obituaries most of the narrative is spent in youth, then in anticipation of the second coming. Finally their bodies will be whole. Finally they will meet with their maker and feel the peace that has been denied them on this earth.
How though, I wonder, can a god grant a man peace? It is audacious to claim his power is one of calm when all that god hath wrought on this earth is to make something once strange and beautiful, even in its sharp sadistic pains, more like hell. When, in our own attempts to make ourselves more like gods, we do so by making this world even more of a hell.
Who invented forgiveness, do you think?
It sounds like gaslighting to me.
The first woman who calls my ex’s behavior abuse is almost fifteen years older than me. She is sitting with me in a Lyft after a work event, and she tells me about her interactions with the man I love, loved, love, loved—the tense should be either past or present, but instead this is a strange hybrid state. It is over, it is not over.
This woman tells me her story about this man I love/loved and says, I’d never been gaslit before, I did not understand what was happening. And this is the first time someone has used this word with me, about him. I am confident when I say, Yes. I feel relief, and from then on the story will begin to make some sense. I say, Yes, that’s it.
Yes, gaslighting, Merriam-Webster’s most popular word of 2022, is overused and misunderstood. But it does something terrifying to you, this tearing away of your reality. And we only have our reality once. Our perceptions once. This experience with abuse has shifted all my life. I am still torn away from each hour. I am sealing my understanding of them to the wall of my consciousness like rolling wallpaper along muggy glue. Like licking an envelope. Sometimes it sticks.
I watch my uterine lining fall off my cervix through an ultrasound. This growth and shedding has been happening since I was ten, but I have never witnessed it before. The fertility doctor is tracking my cycles as I anticipate creating a new life, and through this tracking I see my cervix for the first time, the lining that expands and even changes textures throughout the month. I am introduced to my ovaries, full of black spots I am informed are not cancers but follicles. We watch as one self-selects through the month and grows to 22mm, enough to dwarf its companions. I feel like a chicken. We see the swollen luteal phase, and push against the uterus in my stomach to hold it still while we observe. In black and white on this screen I learn things about my body that I have not known for the thirty years I have been made of it. I am, for the first time, witnessing the truth of who I have been. The mechanics of what my childhood religion, my former god, my family, believe I was made for.
For most of my adult life I did not want to have children. Before I understood sex or gender I understood I did not like the way my cunt dictated my identity. My personality and aspirations consigned to devotion and birthing. But after living with and helping raise my ex’s son, I felt devoured with longing for motherhood. In couple’s therapy my ex would attack me, “You do not want to be _____’s stepmother, you want to be his mother.” And he was not wrong, though I would deny it. I wanted to keep his son safe, and I wanted to witness his daily transformations. I adored the way he was like my ex, awed but afraid of the ways he was like his mother, my ex’s ex-wife, and unendingly curious about the ways he was separate from both of them and becoming more so every hour.
Caretaking as an adult, rather than as a child, offered pleasure too. Long walks around the neighborhood became new again. Evenings became a sacred place to provide safety for the purposeful family.
The fertility doctor tells me it is important to have a small invasive procedure to be sure my fallopian tubes are working. Through a catheter she inserts saline into my uterus and I am allowed to see the cavity, the tubes flushed and healthy. The assistant, who is slowly coming around to me, and who has touched my genitals with more consistency and care than any lover this month, says my ultrasound is “textbook.” The doctor and the aid use the word, beautiful, a descriptor I am dangerously vulnerable to.
The fertility doctor’s aid warns me not to go down any kind of online rabbit hole about this procedure, and I know, because I have, that this is because the fertility doctor has a malpractice claim against her. In July 2023 a woman sat down with this doctor for a standard saline sonogram, and the doctor inserted trichloroacetic acid instead of salt water through the catheter in her cervix. In the articles and interviews the woman describes the burning pain. She may never be capable of having children.
The fertility doctor’s assistant looks up at me from between my stirupped feet and asks if I am in pain. She asks if I can believe it will pass. I look into her blue eyes set in soft cheeks, and say I am confident it will all be fine. There is so much we are asked to believe in that we cannot see, but there must be a limit at some point? There can only be so much that we convince ourselves of? But she is not lying, not in the larger sense. It will all pass, and no doubt too soon.
The musician and I have not been sleeping. We are intent on devouring one another. As we roll around one another's bodies, hands against flanks against skull against cheeks and backs, I am always on the verge of cumming but cannot cross, and so scream. He will finish with frustration then fuck me with his fingers or metal or his tongue, and then will find his way in again, and I will croon and groan.
It is 5 a.m. though, and after a night of this, he is exhausted. He holds my body, kissing with eyes closed the side of my left breast. I am still masturbating. I am fevered. He says he only needs a minute, his big thumb tucked between two of my low ribs. I am grinding myself to the point of nonexistence. I am going to break. When I fear I cannot take it anymore I imagine a man at the foot of the bed, observing the musician who is holding my chest. I imagine him telling us both a narrative about what is happening. Making meaning of the interaction. Leaning into his observations would allow me release.
This morning I cum to a porn video called “Fuck me Daddy,” which is as disappointing as its name. It is no better than the sex I have, even, much worse. I like to watch with the sound off, so I cannot even hear the word which the algorithm correctly guessed I would be drawn to. Mostly missionary. A small riding crop playing on the woman’s pussy, but there are no wounds. There is no true submission. I give as good as I take, I know what this looks like from both ends.
After the funeral for my uncle my biological family plays cards in the room where he died. They send me photos of this too. My grandmother made up so she looks 55 in a maxi dress and green eyeshadow. My younger brother, 6’3” and muscular, his arm around his second wife, laughing. My uncle ___ and his second wife. My Uncle ___, with his secret smile which conceals his bunker and his gold bars and his violent misogyny. His wife, that old beauty pageant star.
A child from my oldest Aunt’s second marriage is sitting on a soft armchair. When this husband passed, this child’s mother took selfies, smiling genuine and embracing the casket. I suppose the girl isn’t a child now though, she is a young adult, and she looks a little like me, huddled in a black hoodie on a soft armchair, the one where both my grandfather and uncle spent the last minutes of their life, and those after they had moved on. Their ghosts given, but their heads still cradled by the green fabric.
On my third night of my first writing residency in rural Virginia, I sat in a plush chair and drank through a six pack, one beer after the other, while the moon shone on the green grass and the deer outside my window, and I listened to Mormon hymns so soft I could also hear the avant garde composer at his piano in the studio next to me. Here I read through the CES Letters, a document written by a former member of the church which “debunks” the entire premise of the faith.
It is written by an entitled white man who is enraged over his loss of uniqueness. His special place in god’s empire. His planet in the next life. But, it is also compellingly thorough and wrenching. It is a story of betrayal and heartbreak to which the church has never responded. And were they to do so, I am almost certain the writer would dive back into the warm embrace of that security. I know most of the contents. The falsified sequence of events. The illogic. The racism. The subjugation. The gender essentialism. The rape after rape after rape by church leaders. The sinister origins of polygamy. But it is hard to see it written so plainly by a man who is begging to still, somehow, believe.
…Obviously, I’m a disaffected member who lost his testimony so it’s no secret which side I’m on at the moment. All this information is a result of over a year of intense research and an absolute rabid obsession with Joseph Smith and Church history. With this said, I’d be pretty arrogant and ignorant to say that I have all the information and that you don’t have answers. Like you, I put my pants on one leg at a time and I see through a glass darkly. You may have new information and/or a new perspective that I may not have heard or considered before. This is why I’m genuinely interested in what your answers and thoughts are to these issues.
Excerpt from letter to the former CES director by Jeremy T Runnells
While I read the letter I think of tales of Joseph Smith’s schmoozy charisma which led to follower after follower. Which led to books and funds and the laying on of hands and stones erected in the honor of the God you cannot help but believe he has found, here, in the Americas.
As I think of these stories I sometimes see my ex’s face, his easy arms and fingers. The way he is tossed around in a room from conversation to conversation.
A “loser,” my friends call him now. A sad man. A famous novelist calls him a villain.
No one calls him Daddy. No one says, Your fallen god.
And now too I see my uncle R. I see a life spent looking for validation from a con-man—and I am afraid we are not so different, he and I.
Why do we believe these men?
At a bar with the musician I say I have sometimes been shocked this summer, after the University of the Arts, the university I was teaching at, was closed with only a week’s notice—the students and faculty and staff, some who had given their lives to the institution, bereft and financially ruined and unmoored—by the amount of interfacing I am expected to do with people who say things that are baldly untrue without any self-consciousness.
There are two shapes to this, surely. There are the straight-faced and sinister lies of the old university administrators, and then there are the somehow less flimsy and more frightening lies of the civil servants. I am shocked how much people want to believe the most confident of those working on “my” team, who, while often competent, are also often wrong. Are also those least likely to have true heartfelt investment, and instead use tragedy as a means to propel their image and power for the sake of ego. I try to only say the things I know for certain. I am widely regarded to be none too bright.
I wonder if my uncle tried, the way I try, to live honestly, and I wonder if we both have failed in this attempt. I wonder if he is just a classic Narcissist, the way my aunt says he is.
Every person I sleep with now has a rash of unwieldy BPD exes, and I purse my lips with nauseating shame. These words the internet encourages me to embrace as the single answer to all of my most nuanced relational pains. All of my faults. I am a disordered person attracted to disordered persons.
Joseph Smith tarred and feathered and grinning with a woman on each arm.
Jesus Christ walking on water.
What if we want to believe in the narcissist, the gaslighter, the father, the god, the abuser, not because we believe he is better than us, but because he reminds us of ourselves, and because he is content in himself? How many lives can be ruined in desiring to prove oneself enough? In looking for the relief that might come from just, for once, someone stroking your cheek and telling you, yes. Better then truly to turn to the original form of goodness. To God himself.
It cannot be that simple, can it?
The musician is wondering how he might bring me more pleasure, and I have yet to tell him it is a very simple phrase found in pornography all the time. It is really, one very simple adjective or descriptor he need use only sparingly at a critical moment. The key is not in the bend of his fingers or the force of the impact or discovering the right toy, it is only he needs to tell me a story about myself with so much sincerity that I can believe in it. He just needs to convince me I am, not even good, but maybe just for the moment, good enough.
The musician kisses my left breast half between sleep, his feet hanging off the edge of the bed, and he lets me run my fingers through his hair. Brown, straight, receding. There is something to his face that reminds me of my mother’s side of the family. The side where there are monsters.
As a child we would visit Palmyra, New York to see the place where Joseph Smith was raised and met his angels. The angels Smith would use to threaten that first fourteen-year-old girl with a fiery sword if she did not spread her legs. I once prayed in that Sacred Grove.
My ex once had a union conversation with a man at the Fox school of business, who, it came out in conversation, had recently left the Mormon church. My ex told the man his partner was also an exmo. The man in business told my ex to be careful. They’re crazy, he said. The women. They don’t know how to be human. They’re just raised to be bred.
My ex had that suspicious glint in his eye when he said it. Like he too knew I did not know how to be anything but bred.
I am lying back, my feet in stirrups, and again the doctor’s assistant asks if I am in any pain.
I am thinking of the children singing at my grandfather’s funeral last year. The five of them laughing next to the corpse. I am thinking of walking barefoot through the grass in Virginia and watching the moon like I am a trope. Weeping. My head flush with We Thank Thee Oh God for a Prophet. The joy I once felt at the Temple. Yes, the peace I once felt there.
I think of the photo of my uncle’s corpse, which my mother sent me despite my insistence I had seen dead bodies (I have), I had seen starved bodies before (I have), and I did not need to see his. But I think it is the first time I have actually been able to tolerate the sight of him in years. Lying on his side on the armchair. Hands curled to protect his face. The skin pulled back against his skull, the bones of the wrists and forearms. Light from the kitchen which will haunt the nightmares of those he claimed to love until they too are given this final rest. His pain continues in the lives and blood of those he leaves behind, but at least he is gone. My mother and aunt sat vigil with the body for six hours, waiting for the coroner. Again, the eyes unclosed.
I tell the fertility doctor’s assistant that perhaps I am actually in great pain. That maybe what I said earlier about being okay was false. The contractions have been likened to early labor as my cervix pulses around the foreign objects. The doctor’s assistant promises it will pass. I say, When? And she says, Soon. And, even as I am trying to be optimistic here, I hate her for being able to tell a lie so easy. That stories come readily to her lips. Can she truly know?
After the procedure the musician closes his eyes on my chest. I drink Cherry Blossom La Croix, which I say tastes like Japan and that sweet pink bubblegum children’s medicine. I am trying not to move and disturb him. Someone will tell me in a writing group to make a shape particulate, but I am not ashamed to say that, despite my age and experience, I know nothing. I do not understand the words that are said to me. To make a shape particulate? I cannot parse. I cannot spin the words and eject them. I cannot translate. I am increasingly limited. I am told that in order to stop a genocide I must support the administration which commits a genocide. I am told by the doctor’s assistant that there is nothing to worry about, as long as I do no research on the internet. My donor tells me he will be receptive to being contacted later in life, as if he knows the man he will be.
In the book of Helaman the Lord tells Nephi that he will be bestowed with a special priesthood power that belongs to no other man, in order to move the wicked populations of the Americas to righteousness. My mother tells me she will not send the photo. My uncle tells his wife he will never hurt her again, he tells his second wife he will never hurt her again, he tells his third. He tells my mother he is ready to die as he lashes against her constraining limbs. He tells himself.
The doctor’s assistant warns me that the pain will pass. That all of this is temporary.
I cannot make abuse have any meaning. A salt upon our limited lives. Six years ago I would stack and sculpt words with intention and care. I would look at them and they would reflect back to me something I could believe in. I would say the Cherry Blossom La Croix tastes like Japan. I would say two days ago my uncle R finally died.
But what even does that mean? It means I am requiring faith of my own memories. I am requiring you to have faith in me walking you back to Takadanobaba.
I cannot make that ask of you and I cannot live if I cannot.
The pain makes itself so hard that it breaks, and beneath is hot pleasure. I thought it was like lava—dangerous, but it is more like a bubblegum ball, fresh.
When the pain is like this, split and surrendered to the sides of living, it can be too easy to tell others that it was never your whole world. Even that it was never real at all.
∩
Sam Heaps is a labor organizer. Their novella The Living god is forthcoming from Sarka in October 2025, and their memoir Proximity was released through Clash Books in 2023. They teach writing at Temple University and call Philadelphia home.