The Burn You Need

Eight years ago, my parents got married at Burning Man. This year, I thought my dad would die there. I wasn’t sure whether to write about this experience, but the pull of the words is too strong to resist. Writing has always been how I make sense of life.

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My parents used to say, “We’ll get married when we’re so old, it will be just for fun.” They told us that one day, when they got all wrinkled and gray-haired, we’d all go to Las Vegas and have an Elvis impersonator officiate their wedding. My mom thought Marilyn would be great too.

To them, love is about freedom, and staying together should not be a contract. It should be a daily choice, renewed every morning when they open their eyes and think: “Yes, I’d like to spend another day with this person.”

When I came back from Burning Man in 2016 and described a wedding I’d attended there, my mom’s eyes lit up. “Mon chou,” she said to my dad, “what if we got married there? This sounds even better than Elvis and Marilyn in Las Vegas.”

So the following year, we all went as a family. At sunset in front of the temple, surrounded by friends both old and new, my parents finally said their vows. It felt like the perfect ending to my relationship with Burning Man.

But then my mom turned 70 and made a birthday request: that we all return for a renewal of vows ceremony.

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I hesitate to say that Burning Man is unlike any other place on Earth. Every place is unlike any other. What makes Burning Man so special is the sheer improbability of it: tens of thousands of people building an ephemeral city grounded in principles of self-reliance, self-expression, and decommodification, and surviving in the Black Rock desert with the aim of leaving no physical trace that they were there at all.

There’s no money at Burning Man. Instead, Black Rock City has a culture of gifting: a small trinket, a cold beer, a story, a hug… Those gifts are unconditional: there’s no expectation to give anything in return. They simply create opportunities to connect with strangers and craft memories together.

This year, as a gift, I brought a deck of cards with sentences to complete. When we were sitting in the van on our way to Burning Man, I asked my dad if he wanted to pull one. His card read: “I’m not ready to…”

He immediately said, “Ha, that’s easy!” and took out his pen to complete the sentence. I leaned over to look, and something clenched around my heart when I saw what he’d written: “I’m not ready to leave.” I know, Dad – I’m not ready for you to leave either.

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We had a wonderful week, though not the one we’d planned. Rain turned the playa to mud the first few days, forcing us to abandon our bikes and walk everywhere, but this created an intimate neighborhood feeling I’d never experienced at Burning Man before. We also had to host the renewal of vows ceremony at our camp instead of at the temple. Anytime we made any plan, the weather decided otherwise.

The days blurred together: meeting incredible people, exploring beautiful art, dancing until sunrise. Gifts appeared everywhere: I helped a stranger whose bike broke in a sandstorm, and the next day someone helped when my chain got stuck. When I was freezing in the middle of the night and wondering if I’d find the energy to get back to my camp, an Iranian man appeared with hot chorba. I didn’t manage to see many of my friends, but bumped into people I didn’t even know were there. Everything felt serendipitous, emergent, connected – despite all the disruptions, or maybe because of them.

My dad was making the most of Burning Man. When he wasn’t out and about making friends, he would help at the camp, cooking shakshuka for everyone with my mom, calling out to passersby to come try our wine. He wasn’t sleeping much, and while this worried me, I didn’t want to spoil his fun.

Throughout the week, I’d also randomly burst into tears thinking about the card he pulled, about how lucky we were to all be together in this magical place as a family, alive and loving each other so deeply through everything life had thrown our way.

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Then came Sunday, the last day of Burning Man. We started breaking camp early in the morning to avoid the heat.

The night before, my parents had gone to the Temple right after the Man burn to leave some flowers. When they returned to camp around 2am, my mom was ready for bed, but my dad insisted it was the last night and he wanted to make the most of it. He was still out when we began packing up Sunday morning.

I was helping break down camp and had gone back to our van to pick up something when I found him standing there by the door. “Do you want to lie down?” I asked. “We have enough people helping.”

He looked around uncertainly, then reached for the van’s door handle. As I watched, he started to collapse. I grabbed him just as he began seizing. My sister saw us from across camp and ran over. “Dad, can you hear me? Say something, please!”

We laid him on his side as he started vomiting. Within seconds, an anesthesiologist staying at our camp was kneeling beside us, checking his pulse, pupils, breathing. Then a cardiologist appeared, followed by another doctor who had run over, completely naked. Someone from our camp had already sprinted to get the official medics, who arrived minutes later.

They transported my dad on a stretcher in the back of a van to the Black Rock City medical center, which fortunately was close to our camp. My sister and I followed in another car, our hearts pounding, squeezing each other’s hands.

I clearly remember the hushed, urgent, yet professional voices in the medical tent. My sister went back to check on my mom and little brother while my partner stayed with me. After what felt like hours, the doctor took me outside. “Your father is very, very sick right now,” she said. “There’s nothing more we can do here. We need to get him to the hospital in Reno by helicopter. If you have family nearby, I suggest you make some calls.”

The Burning Man community rallied around us. People from our camp gathered our bikes, brought us coffee while we waited, delivered messages to friends we couldn’t say goodbye to. The Black Rock City officials gave us a special permit to bypass the exodus traffic so we could meet our dad as quickly as possible at Reno’s hospital.

The next 48 hours stretched endlessly. We watched him go through seizure after seizure, his pupils different sizes, his eyes looking lost and scared during the brief moments he opened them. Most of the time, there were no motor responses at all. The doctors spoke carefully about the possibility of a stroke. Cables and tubes ran everywhere – EEG wires monitoring his brain activity, IV lines, a ventilator helping him breathe. The machines beeped constantly, his heart rate dropping dangerously low to 34 with big red letters flashing “BRADY” on the screen, then spiking up to 110 whenever another seizure hit. And the surges of hope whenever his eyelids fluttered.

Only one family member could sleep in the room, so I volunteered. Every thirty minutes, someone would come to perform neurological checks. They did an MRI in the middle of the night, but because it was Labor Day weekend, no doctor was available to read it until the next day.

I filled the waiting hours singing him songs from our childhood, telling him stories, scolding him for not sleeping enough and scaring us like this. “Because of you, we missed the Temple burn this year,” I told him. “And we have so many things left to do together as a family. You remember what you wrote on that card, right? You said you’re not ready to leave. You remember that, don’t you?”

Maybe the most terrifying moment was when the nurses tried to wake him after the sedation should have worn off, and nothing happened. I watched the worry creep across their faces. For 45 minutes, we tried everything – calling his name, shaking his shoulders. “It’s me, it’s Anne-Laure,” I pleaded. “Open your eyes, Dad. Can you see me? Can you hear me?”

We all screamed with joy when he finally squeezed our hands back and his toes began to move, but still worried as he seemed to see things that weren’t there. And then came the moment of intense relief when he looked at us and recognized our faces and whispered our names, and we knew he was coming back to us.

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I’m writing this from a hotel room in Las Vegas. No Elvis, no Marilyn. My dad is seated on the bed. He’s awake, happy, strangely normal except for his arms still covered with bandages. The neurologist just gave us the green light to fly back to Paris tomorrow. Typing these words feels like waking up from a fever dream.

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They say, “You get the burn you need, not the one you want.”

I wonder what I needed there. What could be the lessons? I already knew how short and precious life is – did I really need this reminder? What am I supposed to learn?

Of course I could tell myself that I needed to experience the full weight of nearly losing him to truly understand what “not ready to leave” means. That maybe I needed the visceral understanding of what daily choice in love really means when faced with the possibility of no more mornings to choose each other. That this isn’t just about mortality in the abstract.

But the truth is, I don’t know. I’m just relieved we get to spend a little bit longer together. And for now, that feels like it’s enough.