When Franklin Jones died, his remaining followers packed his body with dry ice for three days

so that people could pay their respects. And then it was brought to a meadow on the group's island

in Fiji, where Jones had said he wanted to be buried.

James Steinberg, one of Jones's most devoted followers,

says more than 300 people traveled to Fiji for the funeral.

I wasn't there. I'd left the group about seven years earlier, after being raised in it and being part of it until I was 16. Now I was busy living my own life. By this point I'd met the woman who would eventually

become my wife at a poetry reading. In 2012 we got married in a Redwood grove in Big Sur.

We wrote poems together, traveled, lived in New York for a while,

recently moved to Los Angeles, adopted a small fluffy dog with a black patch on his eye who sleeps on his back in our bed.

All the good memories have flooded over the bad ones.

And while I was working on the story of Franklin Jones, my wife and I found out that she was pregnant. A few weeks

later while I was carrying out interviews with my parents, I got to tell them the

news, that soon I'd be a parent too.

Now when I think about Franklin Jones, I think about my son.

I wonder if someday decades from now he'll come to me.

Ask me to explain my choices to him, the way I've been asking my parents to explain theirs.

What will I say about Franklin Jones if my son asks?

After all this reporting, I think I can see both sides. I don't believe

that Jones was a god who lived a perfect life culminating in a perfect death, but I

also don't believe he set out to control or hurt his followers.

Now that I have as good an idea as I ever will about who Franklin Jones was,

what do I do with it?

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