No Regrets

babies, and her church.
    In the Mormon Church, marriage is ideally meant to be for life. Christine believed serenely that she and her husband had married with the hope of being together forever—in both life and the Celestial Kingdom beyond. She never looked at another man; it didn’t even occur to her to do that.
    And then, during the Thanksgiving holiday, Christine’s whole world collapsed: She learned that her husband was involved with another woman. She was shocked, but typically, for her, she didn’t blame him; she blamed herself— for being a failure as a wife. She had tried very hard to be the perfect mate, and she had failed.
    Her husband moved out, leaving Christine to support her little boys on her small salary. They moved into a tiny mobile home, and as Christmas neared, she didn’t have enough money for her rent. Her car broke down, and she couldn’t afford to fix it. And she was running out of groceries. Her church was known for taking care of its own, and it maintained warehouses full of food to help members in financial distress. But, as always, Christine was too proud to ask.
    She had been a good worker at the restaurant, but it soon became clear to her fellow waitresses that she justcouldn’t handle it anymore. One friend recalled later, “Her hurt was so obvious—you could almost touch it.”
    Now that her husband was gone, Christine had no one to look after the little boys while she worked. Her bosses noted that she couldn’t keep up with her diners’ orders, and that she wasn’t smiling or joking enough with the customers. Her job was the next thing to go. She was fired just before Christmas. Her phone was disconnected. She stayed inside the trailer, hiding from the world that had suddenly slapped her in the face. And still she cuddled her baby sons and saw that they prayed before each meal— however meager the meal was.
    She tried to give Ryan and Christopher a Christmas. She had no money for a Christmas tree, but she had an idea. A police officer saw her collecting discarded pine boughs from a tree lot. She planned to take them home and wire them together to make them look like a real tree. When she saw the officer watching her, she offered to put them back. He assured her that would not be necessary.
    Alone in their trailer as the bitter winter winds buffeted it, Christine kept going over the sudden ending of her marriage. She took all the blame when it would have been so much better if she had been able to get angry at the man who deserted her. And, slowly, she went from regret to depression and then descended into insanity. She might have been Ophelia twisting blossoms in her hair, insane because she thought Hamlet had deserted her. Christine was just as frail, just as abandoned.
    But dangerous.
    As her thought processes were revealed later in court, she began to believe that she must be very evil indeed to havefailed as a wife. Soon she built on her delusions and thought that her husband was also terribly evil. Her disturbed conclusions got all tangled up with what she believed were Mormon beliefs, beliefs never taught by the Church that had been her guide for so long. Unable to distinguish between what the Church truly said and her own bizarre imaginings, Christine decided that she was what the Mormons called a “son of perdition.” Perdition was synonymous with Satan, and a son or daughter of perdition was an anti-Christ figure closely associated with the devil.
    Christine felt that all hope was gone; she would be cast into “outer darkness” and “go away into a lake of fire and brimstone with the devil and his angels.”
    The Church bishop who talked to the distraught young mother described a “son of perdition” as a person who has gone “beyond faith into absolute knowledge. They have to throw away that knowledge and actually fight Christ— deny that knowledge—become an enemy of Christ and deny that he exists. Judas was a son of perdition.”
    He did not realize how fragmented Christine’s mind had become.
    Christine, spinning deeper and deeper into psychosis, was terrified that her “evil” would become apparent to the Church elders and that they would come and take her children away from her. And yet, she somehow realized that it might be better if her children were removed from her for a while. Again, failing to recognize the danger in her, the bishop assured her that her children needed to be with her.
    In early January, a home teacher of the Mormon