We opened the back door so he could come in from the rain. Gary folded himself carefully into the available space in the backseat, wedging his feet between a litter box and a cat-carrying case. One of the shoulders of his camel-colored overcoat pressed against the steamy car window, the other against a towel-covered birdcage. He asked us to drive into a nearby neighborhood so we could talk. A short distance later, Tom parked the car, turned off the ignition, and we both twisted in our seats to look into the face of the man who would help us through the difficult times ahead.
Gary’s manner comforted me. He not only had a great deal of professional experience, but there was an underlying compassion in the way he spoke to us. He conveyed his concern for us as a bereaved family and acknowledged our need to cope with a devastating loss. Then he asked a series of probing questions about Dylan, about our family, and about our role as parents. As we had done earlier in the day with the detective, we told him everything we knew to be true about our son.
He was trying to establish whether we knew of Dylan’s plans. After listening to our answers, he announced he did not have “one scintilla of doubt” we had not. I felt a flood of relief. Though it didn’t make the slightest difference in the world, I was desperate to know someone believed us. The earth might be roiling and shifting under my feet, but the fact that we’d no inkling of whatever Dylan had been up to was the only truth I could still be sure of.
But our lawyer’s face was serious as he told us: “Your son is responsible for this, but he’s dead. You’re the closest that people can get to Dylan, so they’re going to come after you. After the last victim is buried, there will be a firestorm of hatred leveled against your family. It will be a very difficult time. You will be blamed, and you will be sued, and in the weeks to come, you must think seriously about your safety.”
Firestorm of hatred. I would have cause to think of the phrase many times over the years: it would turn out to be an eerily prescient, pitch-perfect description of what was to come.
Gary suggested steps to ensure our privacy and protection, and he told us he’d be in touch with the officials about retrieving Dylan’s body. I appreciated how clearly he outlined his next steps, and that he told us exactly when he would speak to us again. Then we drove him back to his car. The rest of our drive was silent, as Tom and I struggled to process what Gary had said.
Don and Ruth were looking out for us, and they opened the garage door as we approached so our car wouldn’t be spotted on the street. I’ll never forget that slit of light slowly opening to a bright rectangle in the blackness, or how deeply surreal and science-fictional it felt to glide into their garage, as if we were docking a spaceship. At the time, I was conscious of a profound sense of unreality. I was wrong. This was our new reality.
Tom turned off the ignition, and we sat together a moment in silence. I took a deep breath before opening the passenger-side door. I was upset to be inconveniencing Tom’s family so greatly, and afraid we were bringing the threat of exposure to their lives, but the predominant emotion I was feeling was shame. It was hard to get out of the car.
Both of Tom’s parents were dead by the time he was twelve. He had been raised by his half brother, but Ruth was older and out of the house by then. (Tom and I are nearer in age to Ruth and Don’s children than we are to Ruth and Don.) Although there was great affection between us—I thought of them like an aunt and uncle—I still felt a bit formal, too, always trying to put my best foot forward.
Don is the son of a farmer, generous to a fault—the kind of salt-of-the-earth, hardworking Midwestern guy you hope to end up with as a neighbor. Ruth is known for her loving generosity. They’re both gentle and soft-spoken and kind and have four beautiful daughters, all of them successful in their own right. And yet, there I was, slinking into their home under cover of darkness, the mother of a criminal.
Don and Ruth’s greeting was warm but quiet as they helped us unload the car. I was profoundly thankful when Byron arrived minutes after we did. We set up camp in the basement apartment. I was relieved to see two alert faces with bright-orange cheeks peering out at their new surroundings when I removed the towels from the birdcage. Because of Ruth’s allergies, we put our two cats, Rocky and Lucy, in the utility room, and they slunk behind the dryer in the unfamiliar space. I wished I could do the same.
When we joined Don and Ruth upstairs, I discovered that being inside a normal home was even more nightmarish than the frantic limbo we’d endured outside of our own. Those long hours in the driveway, we’d been suspended in time, without any access to news. But Don and Ruth, like everyone else in the country (and, we would discover later, around the world) were glued to the nonstop television coverage of the shootings.
We went from having no information to having too much. The chaos inside my mind was hard enough to bear, but the sudden flood of televised speculation and information was infinitely worse. We could see the horrifying aftermath of what our son had done, the incongruity of a triage center set up on a suburban front lawn. We could hear the shock and horror in the voices of the kids who had escaped the school, see the grim looks on the faces of the first responders. There was no escaping the enormity of it all.
The eyewitness descriptions were so horrific I could feel them bouncing right off my brain. It must have been then, too, that I heard early descriptions of the victims for the first time, although I do not remember that part. I would later learn it is common for people in the immediate throes of desperate grief to experience this type of denial, and in the years since, I have talked with many people who are puzzled and ashamed by it—as I was—but the brain takes in only what it can bear.
Outside our home, insulated from news, we’d still been able to keep the tragedy at arm’s length. All at once, it was suffocatingly close: the difference between seeing a fire at a distance and standing knee-deep in live coals while the inferno rages around you. When I began to moan, “My God. This can’t be true. I can’t watch this,” Ruth quickly told Don to turn off the TV. The silence was better, even if the echoes of the horrors we’d seen and heard still bounced off the walls around us.
Near midnight, it became clear our hosts needed to go to bed. All day long, I had wanted privacy so I could collapse in grief, and silence so I could focus on the incomprehensible situation and the loss of my son. With that moment upon me, though, I felt terrified of being alone with the unspeakable truth.
Ruth put fresh sheets on the guest beds in the basement and then left us. Byron was to sleep on a hideaway bed in the downstairs office, right outside the spare room where Tom and I were staying. I left the door open all night, so I could see the lump Byron’s feet made under the blanket; it was vital for me to know he was there. I must have checked for that lump a hundred times.
As the house grew quiet, Tom and I lay sleepless beside one another, touching each other’s hands and shoulders to offer what precious little comfort there was to be had. We had lost our son: Dylan was dead. We did not know where, or in what condition, his body was. We did not know if he had taken his own life, or if he had been killed by the police, or by his friend. Despite the horrifying reports we had heard on the news, we still did not know exactly what he had done.
That first night, the idea that Dylan could have been centrally involved in this monstrous event was beyond my ability to grasp, and I refused it. Instead, I conjured a million alternative explanations. I could not fathom how Dylan could have obtained a gun, or why he would have wanted one. I obsessed instead on a million other possible scenarios: Was he duped into participating, thinking the ammunition was fake? Had it been a prank gone terribly wrong? Had he been forced to participate, under some kind of duress? I told myself that even if our son had been a part of what had happened, he hadn’t necessarily shot anyone. Both Tom and I believed with all of our hearts that Dylan could not have killed anyone, and we clung, not just for hours and days, but for months, to that belief.
In the long hours of that night, and in the following days,
my mind would only occasionally light upon the idea that there were people Dylan might have hurt, but then that intolerable thought would skitter away just as fast. It shames me, even now, to admit this. At the time, I simply felt crazy. By many standards, I was.
After Tom fell into a fitful sleep, I pressed a pillow against my face to silence my sobbing. For the first time I truly understood how “heartbroken” had come to describe a sensation of terrible, terrible grief. The pain was actual, physical, as if my heart had been smashed to jagged fragments in my chest. “Heartbroken” was no longer a metaphor, but a description.
I did not sleep, and my thoughts as I lay there were as circular and disjointed as they’d been all day. I’d told the detective Dylan had attended prom the weekend before with a big group of his friends, and I returned to my memories of that night and the next day. I’d gotten up from bed to check in with him when he got home early the morning after prom. He’d had a great night, and thanked me for buying his ticket. He’d danced! Not for the first time in his life, I had reflected on how our youngest son always seemed to do things right. I’ve done a good job with this kid, I’d thought to myself as I returned to my room that night. A mere seventy-two hours later, and I was lying rigid in an unfamiliar bed, that feeling of warm satisfaction supplanted by utter confusion, growing horror, and sorrow. Integrating the two realities seemed impossible.
The day before his prom, Dylan had sat shoulder to shoulder with his father, looking at the floor plans of various dorm rooms, working out the comparative square footage of each configuration. At six foot four (and as someone who’d never shared a bedroom with anyone before), Dylan had wanted to secure as much real estate as possible. I’d laughed, then, to see the two of them there, scribbling sums on scrap paper. It was so quantitative—and so like Dylan!—to choose his college dorm room by using math.
Those memories were so recent as to be still warm, and reflecting back on them threw me into even greater confusion. Was any of that the behavior of a person preparing to go on a killing spree?
This only started to make sense when I began to learn more about people who are planning to die by suicide. They often make concrete plans for the future: surviving family members are frequently baffled by recently purchased cars and booked cruises. Talking with people who have survived their own suicide attempts has helped researchers to shed light on the mystery. In some cases, these future plans are a way to throw concerned friends and family members off a trail of suicidal behavior. If you were concerned a person close to you was planning self-harm, wouldn’t your concerns be assuaged if they booked a cruise?
In other cases, such plans are simply sign and symptom of the genuinely “broken” logic driving the suicidal brain. They may signal the ambivalence the person feels—a desire to live that is, at times, as strong as the desire to die. A person with intent to self-harm can also believe simultaneously in both realities: that they will take a Caribbean vacation, and that they will have died by suicide before they have the chance to go.
I knew none of this then, and so the idea of Dylan eagerly making plans for his future at college while planning a shooting rampage that would end in his own death seemed absurd—and thus more evidence that he could not have meant to participate.
In the months and years to follow, I would be forced many times to confront everything I did not know about my son. This Pandora’s box will never empty; I will spend the rest of my life reconciling the reality of the child I knew with what he did. That night was the last time I was able to hold Dylan in my mind exactly as I had held him in life: a beloved son, brother, and friend.
And so it was that, when the blue-gray light of dawn finally appeared through the basement windows, I was still asking the question—first to Dylan, and then to God—the question that would bedevil and perplex me, and ultimately animate the rest of my life: “How could you? How could you do this?”
CHAPTER 3
Someone Else’s Life
Yesterday, my life entered the most abhorrent nightmare anyone could possibly imagine. I can’t even write.
—Journal entry, April 21, 1999
The next morning, it felt as if I’d been dropped without warning into someone else’s life.
Just the month before, an old friend had come to town. Catching up over dinner, I’d told her my life had never been more satisfying. I had recently turned fifty. I had a loving husband, and a marriage that had withstood twenty-eight years of ups and downs. Byron was fully supporting himself, and sharing an apartment with a friend. Dylan had recovered from an episode of trouble in his junior year and had done a great job of getting back on track; he was heading into the homestretch before graduation, hanging out with his friends and planning for college. I even had a little free time to draw and paint. The single biggest worry in my life, I told her, was the declining health of our beloved elderly cat, Rocky.
On April 20, 1999, I woke up an ordinary wife and mother, happy to be shepherding my family through the daily business of work, chores, and school. Fast-forward twenty-four hours, and I was the mother of a hate-crazed gunman responsible for the worst school shooting in history. And Dylan, my golden boy, was not only dead, but a mass murderer.
The disconnect was so profound that I could not wrap my head around it. Over the course of that first night in Don and Ruth’s basement guest room, I had come to accept that Dylan was dead, but Tom and I were still in complete denial that he could have taken the lives of others.
More than anything else, this is what stands out about those early days in the aftermath of Columbine: the way we were able to cling, in strange and stubborn ways, to an unreality shielding us from a truth we could not yet bear. But those contortions could not protect us for very long from the wrath of a community we had come to love, or from the emerging truth about our son.
• • •
Don and Ruth were infallibly generous and kind, but they were utterly helpless in the face of our bewilderment and grief, as anyone would have been.
I could barely speak. When I did open my mouth to make a comment, more often than not, I’d trail off mid-thought. The idea of eating was inconceivable: a fork looked like an alien instrument in my hand, and the mere smell of Ruth’s delicious cooking made my stomach churn.
I was exhausted, lower in energy than I’d ever been in my life, moving through the hours as if buried in wet cement. I dimly remember a worried Ruth covering me with an afghan as I lay motionless on her couch. Sleep provided only a temporary reprieve: the second I became conscious, I’d be crushed all over again by the enormity of what Dylan had done, and by the senselessness of it. It’s a cliché, I suppose, to say I was behaving like a zombie, but that is the closest description I have for the way I felt in those early days.
Under normal circumstances—if any circumstances involving the death of a child can ever be called normal—we would have called family members and friends to share the awful news. They would have gathered to grieve with us, and to offer support. We would have been kept busy readying the house for visitors, and friends would have come bearing stories, poems, and photographs to honor Dylan. These coping mechanisms in the face of grief are time-honored and shared across many cultures because they are effective; they give families comfort at a time when very little can. For us, nothing could have been further from normal than our lives during the days following Dylan’s death.
Almost everyone who’d ever known us knew of our son’s connection to the Columbine tragedy within hours of it happening, but they couldn’t get in touch with us because we had fled for our lives. Horrified family members and friends who called our home that afternoon either received no answer or found themselves talking to the law enforcement officials still searching our house.
Clearly, we couldn’t have any of our out-of-state family members or close friends come to Littleton to be with us. Even if we had anywhere for them to stay, we couldn’t guarantee their safety. In hiding at Don and Ruth’s house, we were insulated from how frighten
ing the situation in the community was. We wouldn’t really know how much danger we’d been in until I read about one of Tom’s long-lost cousins in the paper: he was going public to say he’d never met Dylan, and begging people to stop sending him death threats. In the forty-eight-hour period following the shootings, a cluster of family members received more than two thousand phone calls from media and members of the community. Not all were threatening, of course—even in the immediate aftermath, people reached out in support—but it was still unmanageable. A local reporter tried to push his way into my eighty-five-year-old aunt’s home in Ohio. (She was proud she’d stood up to him by asking him to leave, though she insisted he take a fresh-baked cookie with him.)
I couldn’t in good conscience invite the people I loved to a community whose grief was mingled with rage toward our family. In choosing seclusion, we had chosen safety. We had also cut ourselves off from the comfort of others who had loved Dylan.
According to the police report released months later, we were officially notified of Dylan’s death on the day after the massacre. I don’t remember it. Neither does Tom. I do remember learning our son’s body had been moved to the coroner’s for autopsy, news that gave a solid, tangible weight to the fact of Dylan’s death it had not yet had for us. I found the idea of him lying, all alone, on a frigid steel table intolerable. I’d been by his side for every visit to the pediatrician, had held his hand for every vaccination; I’d never missed one of his dental appointments. I longed to go to the coroner’s office to be with him, just so he would not have to be alone.
At the same time, Tom and I held out hope for the autopsy, praying the results would come back positive for drugs. At least drug abuse might give us a way to explain how Dylan could have been involved with this monstrous event.
Mother's Reckoning : Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy (9781101902769) Page 5