That first morning in our own bed, Tom’s hand crept across the coverlet, and we lay there together in silence, staring at the ceiling and gripping each other’s hands. Finally, one of us swung our feet to the floor, and together we ventured out of the bedroom. I flinched as I walked through the house in the daylight and confronted photographs of the boys—hiking and fishing with their dad, in their baseball uniforms, whitewater rafting with another family, standing on the rocks near our house. From table surfaces and bookshelves, Dylan’s impish, joyful face beamed out at me.
The main room of our beloved house, the place we’d lived in for more than ten years, home to countless classic movie nights and homework skirmishes and family dinners, was unrecognizable. We could not have survived without the privacy, but the blocked windows made the wide-open space look dark and sinister. The clean sunlight that usually flooded the house bounced off the newspaper and filled the air with the dirty smell of wet dog. I could hear birds at the feeder outside, but I couldn’t see them.
The short journey from the bedroom to the kitchen exhausted me, and I gripped the counter to hold myself up. Standing there, I thought suddenly of an unsettling moment I’d had years ago in the hospital, right after Dylan’s birth.
He’d been born in the early morning of September 11, 1981. As with his older brother, Tom and I had named our second son for a poet, the Welsh playwright Dylan Thomas. The sheets in the hospital birthing room had yellow flowers on them, and Dylan’s arrival was so quiet and uneventful I could hear the whispers of nurses in the hallway while I was in labor. He cried out once before settling into my eager arms and squinting into the light.
Like every new mother, I was delighted to meet this brand-new creature I already had such an intimate relationship with. The next morning, we finally got a minute alone, and I was thrilled to kiss his smooth cheeks and wonder at his tiny, perfect fingers and toes. But as I held him, I experienced a deep and unsettling sense of foreboding, strong enough to make me shiver. It was as if a bird of prey had passed overhead, casting us into shadow. Looking down at the perfect bundle in my arms, I was overcome by a strong premonition: this child would bring me a terrible sorrow.
I am not superstitious by nature, and this was a feeling I had never experienced before, and haven’t since. I was so startled by it, I could hardly move. Was this a mother’s intuition? Was my seemingly healthy baby sick? But everything checked out fine, and the hospital sent me home with my new little boy.
Two weeks later, Dylan vomited profusely after a feeding, and then after the next. Badly frightened, I took him to the emergency room. The doctors kept him two nights for observation, but found nothing. At the follow-up visit I insisted upon later that week, three-week-old Dylan was pale, dehydrated, and below his birth weight. By then, the condition had developed enough to show up on an X-ray, and Dylan was diagnosed with pyloric stenosis, a narrowing at the base of the stomach. The doctor sent us back to the hospital. The situation was so serious, Dylan might have died without immediate surgery.
After he pulled through that harrowing ordeal and turned into his sweet, plump, rosy-cheeked baby self, I felt all the obvious relief and more besides, sure that this serious illness—disaster averted—was my premonition realized.
That childhood illness was also the last time, until his junior year of high school, that I ever had real cause to worry about Dylan.
CHAPTER 6
Boyhood
With Dylan as a toddler, playing in the snow.
The Klebold Family
The terror and total disbelief are overwhelming. The sorrow of losing my son, the shame of what he has done, the fear of the world’s hatred. There is no respite from the agony.
—Journal entry, April 1999
I’ve kept a diary most of my life. In late elementary school and junior high, I poured my hopes and dreams onto the pages of little books I kept locked and hidden—not that anyone on earth cared what blouse I’d worn, or where I’d taken my dog for a walk. I filled one page to the bottom, every day. If my sister grew impatient and turned off our bedroom light, I’d finish the page in the dark.
In high school and college, I focused more on writing letters to my sister and my mother and my grandparents, although I did make time to write (bad) poetry. After I married and had children, I journaled whenever I wanted to remember landmark events or cope with difficult emotions. I took pleasure in recording the developmental milestones of both my children, and captured the dates when they noticed their own hands for the first time, or rolled over, or took their first steps. As the boys grew, and managing their busy lives took more of my time, the entries grew shorter and more quotidian: “Byron to dentist, must floss. Dylan’s team won: 6–3!”
In the first days after Columbine, I turned again to writing as an outlet, in a journal Dylan had given me for Christmas. Tom and I always told the boys not to bother buying us expensive gifts, and so I had been touched, in 1997, to find a leather-bound writing journal in my stocking. I made such a fuss over how great it was that Dylan got me another diary for Christmas in 1998, this one with a reproduction of Edvard Munch’s The Scream on the cover. The image seemed ominously symbolic afterward, of course, but at the time I was simply touched by the thoughtful gift—both art- and writing-themed, and therefore perfect for me.
After Columbine, the relief I got from writing felt almost physical, if temporary. My diaries became the place for me to corral the myriad, often-contradictory feelings I had about my son and what he had done. In the earliest days, writing allowed me to process my tremendous grief for the sorrow and suffering Dylan had caused. Before I could reach out personally to the families of the victims, the journals were a place for me to apologize to them with all my heart, and to grieve privately for the losses they had sustained.
The diaries were also a place for me to “set the record straight.” In the immediate aftershock of the tragedy, we weren’t mourning simply Dylan, but also his very identity—and ours. It was impossible to correct the floods of misinformation in the media, but I wanted to tell our side of the story, if only in private. The pages of my notebook became a place for me to silently respond to the people who called us animals and monsters, to correct misapprehensions about my son and our family. Some of those pages reflect my feelings of defensiveness and even anger toward those who judged us without knowing us. I was not proud of those feelings, and was glad to keep them hidden, but they were necessary for me at the time, and I see the details I obsessed over as unwitting testaments to the shock and grief I was feeling.
Writing in my diary also allowed me the space to reflect on my own loss when I did not feel safe enough to speak about it openly. Our lawyer had told me I could not attend a support group without putting the other members at risk of being deposed, but I needed a safe space to remember and eulogize my son. To the rest of the world, Dylan was a monster; but I had lost my child.
And so, especially in those very early days, a great deal of what I filled my diaries with was memories. Later, I would revisit these as a form of forensic accounting, an attempt to see where things had gone so horribly wrong. Much of grieving is the process of encapsulating the individual in your memory, and for years my grief would be tangled up with wondering what had been in Dylan’s mind at the end of his life. Trying to unravel the mystery would come later. In those first days, I wrote simply out of love.
I downloaded every memory I could dredge up of Dylan—as a child, a young boy, a teenager. I revisited his triumphs and disappointments, as well as a host of small, ordinary moments from our life together. Petrified I’d forget, I recorded the well-worn family stories and inside jokes we’d cherished together, words and phrases that could reduce any one of the four of us to helpless laughter while remaining incomprehensible to an outsider. Writing made me feel close to him.
I know telling these stories here exposes me to further criticism. The thought fills me with fear, although there’s no criticism of my parenting I have not already heard ove
r the last sixteen years. I’ve heard that Tom and I were too lenient with Dylan, and that we were too restrictive. I’ve been told that our family’s position on gun control caused Columbine; perhaps if Dylan had been habituated to guns, they would not have had the same mystique for him. People have asked me if we abused Dylan, if we permitted someone else to abuse him, if we ever hugged him, if we ever told him that he was loved.
Of course I look back skeptically on the decisions we made. Of course I have regrets, in particular about the clues I missed that Dylan was in danger of hurting himself and others. It is precisely because I missed them that I want to tell these stories, because whatever parenting decisions Tom and I might have made, they were done thoughtfully and in good conscience, and to the best of our abilities. I tell these stories not to burnish my son’s reputation, or our own as parents. But I do think it’s important, especially for parents and teachers, to understand what Dylan was like.
In the fifteen years I’ve worked in suicide and violence prevention, I’ve heard hundreds of stories of lives that ended in tragedy. Sometimes, parents tell me they knew their kid was in trouble. They describe a baby they couldn’t settle; disturbingly antisocial behaviors in elementary school; an angry, violent teenager they grew to fear. In many cases, these parents tried repeatedly, and often without success, to get their kids help. I will talk more about cases like these later in this book; we must make it easier for parents and other gatekeepers to get help for a child who is obviously having a hard time before that child becomes a danger to himself and others. But I mention those struggling families here because I want to make an important differentiation. That child, whose difficulties surface early and strain his or her whole family for years? That was not my son.
There were hints that Dylan was troubled, and I take responsibility for missing them, but there was no deafening klaxon, no blinking neon danger sign. You wouldn’t nervously herd your child away from Dylan if you saw him sitting on a park bench. In fact, after a few minutes of chatting with him, you’d be more likely to invite him home for Sunday dinner. As far as I’m concerned, it is precisely this truth that makes us so vulnerable.
In the aftermath of Columbine, the world’s judgment was understandably swift: Dylan was a monster. But that conclusion was also misleading, because it tied up too neatly a far more confounding reality. Like all mythologies, this belief that Dylan was a monster served a deeper purpose: people needed to believe they would recognize evil in their midst. Monsters are unmistakable; you would know a monster if you saw one, wouldn’t you? If Dylan was a fiend whose heedless parents had permitted their disturbed, raging teen to amass a weapons cache right under their noses, then the tragedy—horrible as it was—had no relevance to ordinary moms and dads in their own living rooms, their own children tucked snugly into soft beds upstairs. The events might be heartbreaking, but they were also remote. If Dylan was a monster, then the events at Columbine—however tragic—were anomalous, the equivalent of a lightning strike on a clear, sunny day.
The problem? It wasn’t true. As monstrous as Dylan’s actions were, the truth about him is much harder to square. He wasn’t the pinwheel-eyed portrait of evil we know from cartoons. The disquieting reality is that behind this heinous atrocity was an easygoing, shy, likable young man who came from a “good home.” Tom and I were hands-on parents who limited the intake of television and sugary cereals. We monitored what movies our boys could see, and put them to bed with stories and prayers and hugs. With the exception of some troubling behavior the year before the tragedy (hardly out of the ordinary for a teenage boy, we were told), Dylan was the classic good kid. He was easy to raise, a pleasure to be with, a child who had always made us proud.
If the portrayal of Dylan as a monster left the impression that the tragedy at Columbine had no relevance to average people or their families, then whatever measure of comfort it offered was false. I hope the truth will awaken people to a greater sense of vulnerability—more frightening, perhaps, but crucial—that cannot be so easily circumscribed.
• • •
I’d wanted to be a mother since I was a child myself. Tom had lost both of his parents when he was a child, and despite the loving care he received from the family members who raised him, he felt the loss of his mother and father acutely. This strengthened his own resolve to be an active, involved, and present parent. My own 1950s childhood looked like the traditional postwar life depicted in the television shows of the day. Although the world had changed significantly (and I worked four days a week, instead of staying home full-time, as my mother had with her three kids), that close-knit, suburban family model was the one Tom and I followed in raising our own children.
We were confident parents, especially by the time we had our second child. Anxious by nature, I never stopped fussing over choking hazards and good manners. But I’d been babysitting since childhood, and I’d spent the majority of my career teaching both children and adults. My graduate degree had required me to take courses in child development and psychology. Naively, I believed the combination of knowledge and intuition honed by experience was sufficient to stand my own children in good stead. At the very least, I reasoned, we’d know where to turn if we encountered problems.
Our confidence as parents was supported by what we saw in our children. As a small child, Byron, our first, was a joyful whirling dervish. He reminded me of Lucille Ball’s character in I Love Lucy, always getting up to (or into) something. Byron was the kid who whizzed out of the restaurant bathroom, straight into the waitress with the loaded tray. He was the kid who hooked a plate of potato salad so it crashed into his own face, pie-fight style, while demonstrating an armpit fart—and then did it again with a bowl of oatmeal the next morning during a breakfast reenactment. It was pure boyish tomfoolery without an ounce of malice in it. Even Tom was usually laughing too hard at Byron’s antics to get mad.
After Byron’s energy, Dylan’s willingness to sit on the floor and play quietly was a revelation. Both boys were active and playful, but Dylan sought out sedentary tasks that required patience and logic, and after his always-on-the-go brother had outgrown snuggling, Dylan would still slow down for a book or a puzzle or a cuddle with me. Our younger son was observant, curious, and thoughtful, with a gentle personality. Curious about what was going on around him, patient, even-tempered, and quick to giggle, Dylan could make the most routine errand fun. He was up for anything—a social, affable child, who loved to do stuff.
And he was smart. Dylan’s giftedness emerged early. Shortly after he learned to hold objects by himself as a baby, Dylan went through a brief spell of crying at night. We tried everything we could think of to comfort him, and then took him to the pediatrician to see if the problem might be a physical one. The doctor checked him over carefully, and then advised us to put Dylan to bed with safe toys and soft books so he could entertain himself if he woke up. That night, we heard Dylan wake and make quiet sounds as he played with the toys and looked at the books. When he was finished, he went back to sleep. He’d just been bored.
As a teacher, I marveled at his precociousness. Maybe it shouldn’t have mattered so much to me, but he learned so quickly! In third grade he fell in love with origami, an interest that lasted until his adolescence. (A short while after he made his first paper crane, we hosted two Japanese exchange students in our home. Dylan was disappointed to discover the girls didn’t know much more about paper-folding than I did.) Over the years we collected a lot of origami books, and Dylan mastered the most complicated designs, ones with seventy or eighty folds. He moved fast, and his pudgy fingers couldn’t always get the creases razor-sharp, but these were nonetheless little works of art. I still see his handiwork in the homes of our friends, and when his fifth-grade teacher paid us a condolence call after the tragedy, she brought one of her most treasured possessions to show us: an origami tree, decked with tiny origami ornaments—a Christmas gift it had taken Dylan hours to make.
As a toddler, he was fascinated by sna
p-together construction toys; as he grew older, he spent countless hours building with Legos. Precise and methodical, he loved to follow the printed instructions exactly, meticulously building ships, castles, and space stations, only to dismantle and build them again. Dylan had a bunk bed in his bedroom, and Tom placed a large sheet of plywood over the lower bed so Dylan would have an out-of-the-way spot to work on larger and more complicated structures over a period of days. Byron preferred freestyle construction, and his imagination was the source of some wildly creative projects. Dylan was the opposite. Occasionally concerned he was too focused on perfection, Tom and I would talk to him about how it was okay to substitute an alternate piece if he couldn’t find the exact right one.
Similarly, we saw his competitive nature emerge when the four of us played board games together, like Monopoly and Risk. Losing was humiliating for Dylan, and his humiliation sometimes turned to anger. Of course, it’s as important to know how to lose as it is to win, so we continued to play games as a family until Dylan learned to control his temper. He also played Little League baseball, where he learned the importance of sportsmanship. As we hoped, Dylan’s need to win leveled out as he matured. Looking back, however, I wonder if we were inadvertently encouraging Dylan to suppress his feelings, under the guise of learning appropriate play.
Since I’d been a real scaredy-cat as a child, I was impressed by how free of ordinary childhood fears Dylan was. He wasn’t afraid to go to the doctor or the dentist, as I had been at his age. He got his first haircut with a big smile on his face. He wasn’t afraid of the water, or to be left alone in the dark, or of thunder and lightning. Later, when we started going to amusement parks, Dylan could be counted on to pick the scariest rides. Sometimes he had to ride them alone while we waved from below because no one else had the courage to join him.
Mother's Reckoning : Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy (9781101902769) Page 8