Commentary: My mother set herself on fire. Why do people choose to self-immolate?

Ten years before I was born, at 4:40 on the morning of Nov. 10, 1971, my mother and another woman sat “yogi-style” on the floor of an Ann Arbor, Michigan, kitchen and lit themselves on fire. They were just blocks from the University of Michigan campus, where my mother had been a student. She had just turned 20. Police tracked the smell of burning hair to find the women sitting on the floor, facing each other, screaming.

“They weren’t doing anything to put the fire out,” Police Chief Walter Krasny told the Ann Arbor News. “We have no idea why they would do something like this. They