His story was printed in a flimsy paper my mother and I had picked up as we came through this area when she took me out of L.A. before, to help save me. She read it out loud as we drove through the desert, and it stuck with us both.

“Remember the man who dug his own grave?” she’d ask me sometimes.

“Martin Spangler,” I’d say.

We both stared at the picture they’d printed of him. He looked content, free. His was a conscious death.

I thought about Martin as I came back to the car, my parents already inside, both afraid of cemeteries, of dwelling on death, and we pressed on.

“Remember the guy who dug his own grave?” I asked.

“I was just thinking about him,” my mother said.

“What?” my father asked from the back seat.

“He died,” she said.

“Why do you talk about this stuff?” he asked.

“She’s obsessed,” my mother said, pointing at me.

In Van Horn, we caught the I-10 west and headed into New Mexico, then continued north along two-lane highways that brought us through forgotten towns with crumbling asphalt roads, between vast green hills dotted with cattle. We were on a mission to find a church where pilgrims came from all over the world to collect sacred dirt from a hole in the ground. When we drove up to the adobe church, I could already make out crutches hanging from a fence that wound up the walkway. We all got out of the car and went in separate directions, my mother focused on finding her way inside the church as my father meandered through the grass to a stone altar covered in silk flowers, prayer candles, and plastic rosary beads.

I walked through an outbuilding with walls covered in hundreds of laminated portraits of people surrounding statues of the Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Our Lady of La Vang, and St. Francis. This was the place to bring—and leave—your suffering.

I looked at all the people staring back at me—photos both aged and new, faces both smiling and not—and wondered if they had been cured. As I walked on, I saw more crutches and braces and medallions embossed with saints. St. Jude seemed to be the most popular. There were a few people praying in the outbuilding, and I walked out, not wanting to disturb. My father had disappeared, and I wandered into the church. It was a simple room with a dirt-covered floor and stained-glass windows showing the Stations of the Cross. I stared at Jesus, bleeding and carrying his own cross. My mother was on a kneeler, praying, as a priest started a mass devoted to a couple whose names he struggled to pronounce. The adobe church was filled with lit devotional candles that had pictures of St. Jude printed on them. We were all coming here with our hopeless cases.