Tom and I called Dylan “our little trouper” because of his ability to withstand frustration. He wouldn’t quit until he’d conquered a problem, and he rarely abandoned an idea without seeing it through. He didn’t like to ask for help. Then again, he rarely needed it. Because he was so tall and academically gifted, he entered school a year early. For most of his life, he was the youngest kid in his class, and almost always the biggest.
He wasn’t always great at sharing his toys, to the point of hiding his favorites when a particularly grabby playdate was coming over. As a toddler, an exhausted Dylan would occasionally throw himself down in a tantrum at the checkout when my grocery shopping was taking too long, and the way he flaunted how much better he knew his multiplication tables than his older brother was not the most charming thing in the world. But he was nothing if not normal, and we loved him. Tom and I both believed he was destined to do great things.
In the years since, I have thought a great deal about Dylan’s need to convince himself and others that he was completely in control. It was part of his nature from early childhood. While we were proud of this trait when he was young, I wonder now if that pride was misplaced. Because when Dylan really did need help toward the end of his life, he did not know how to ask.
In the wake of Columbine, many people have come forward to share their own stories of hidden pain with me. I find it striking how many of those stories come from so-called perfect kids: the science-fair winner, the track star, the young musician offered a full scholarship to the conservatory of her choice. Sometimes there were glaring signs in the lives of these children that all was not well: declining grades, promiscuity or drug use, trouble with the law. In many cases, though, these kids were able to fly under their parents’ radar precisely because they were the shiny pennies, hiding the terrible pain they were in from their parents as capably as they did everything else.
Whenever I wonder why I am writing this book, exposing myself once again to the judgment and vitriol of the world, those parents are the ones I think about. Dylan may not have been a valedictorian or a star athlete, but we were confident he would handle the inevitable challenges of life gracefully. Would I have parented differently if I had known those stories of kids suffering under the surface while presenting a happy, well-adjusted face to the world? Hindsight is 20/20, but I think if I had known, I would not have been so easily convinced by how effortlessly Dylan seemed to move through his life.
Tom and I always joked that Dylan was on autopilot. At five or six, Dylan asked me to teach him how to give himself a bath. I showed him how to put soap on the washcloth, which parts of his body needed extra attention, and how to rinse himself off thoroughly. Three years older, Byron was still having too much fun in the tub to wash his ears without prompting. I only needed to show Dylan the steps once—and he hung his towel up afterward without me saying a word about it.
In addition to being an easy child, Dylan was a happy one. He was more introverted than his brother but still quick to make friends. When we lived on a street with a lot of kids, Dylan moved comfortably along with a pack of boys his age as they rode around the neighborhood. (We always knew where they were by the herd of bikes lying on the lawn outside whichever house they’d stopped at for a snack.)
As our sons got older, Tom and I were particularly impressed by how seamlessly Dylan fit in with Byron and his friends. One of my favorite pictures, on my desk as I write this, is of Dylan clinging to Byron’s arm like a little monkey, both of them sporting huge grins.
There’s a story from Dylan’s childhood I think about a lot. When he was about ten, he had to have a misplaced, deeply embedded tooth removed. Unfortunately, we had friends coming into town to visit the next day. I probably should have insisted Dylan and I stay home while he recuperated, but there was no way he was going to miss sightseeing with our friends, even with his cheeks swollen up like a chipmunk’s.
I winced whenever I looked at his pale, swollen face, but he didn’t miss a beat—riding go-karts, eating ice cream, and taking the train up Pikes Peak, a mountain with an elevation of more than 14,000 feet and some of the most spectacular scenery in the world. When I anxiously made eye contact with him through the rearview mirror on our way from one place to the next, he smiled softly at me to dispel my worries. Despite my concern, Dylan was having the time of his life.
And when the other mom on the trip and I were too afraid to take the first step out onto the Royal Gorge Bridge, it was Dylan who skipped back to us, alternately teasing and cajoling and encouraging us across the highest bridge in the United States. I can still feel his hand in mine.
• • •
Tom and I had moved several times before we finally found the house we wanted to raise our family in. With its large picture windows and high ceilings, the house had been quite the show home. It had been badly neglected, though, and by the time we bought it, it had fallen into serious disrepair. The pool didn’t hold water, and weeds grew six feet tall through the cracks on the tennis court. The house had a leaky roof and several broken windows, creating easy access routes for the hundreds of ground squirrels, voles, and mice that had taken up residence in and around the house.
The property was too much for us, given our income, but it was surrounded by breathtaking scenery. The extraordinary light in the foothills made the rocks behind our house glow a fiery orange in the mornings and a sweet, deep lavender at dusk. Set among the massive pink sandstone cliffs were twisted, gnarly scrub oaks, bristling prickly pears, and spiky yucca—hardy desert survivors, every one.
The boys and I would sit and watch the wildlife from our picture windows like other families watched television. Scrub jays, flickers, magpies, and chickadees patronized our bird feeders, and deer families and foxes and raccoons shared whatever seeds spilled to the ground. We hosted a family of bobcats in our backyard for a while. One night after dinner, Tom looked up from doing the dishes to see a black bear staring right back at him through the kitchen window, not eighteen inches away. One morning, he saw another bear blissfully lying on his back in the middle of our swimming pool, soaking in a depression in the pool cover that had trapped just enough water for his bath.
One of our neighbors told me the land used to be a wintering ground for a local Native American tribe, and the property had a spiritual feel to it. I had wanted my boys to grow up safely surrounded by the beauty of nature, to roam free in a place that would reward their imaginations. When we found the house in the foothills, as decrepit and neglected as it was, I believed we’d found that place.
We moved in early December of 1989, when Dylan was in third grade. A friendly neighbor gave us an old minibike from his garage, and Tom found a second one, used, in the newspaper classifieds. He and the boys rebuilt the bikes to get them running, and before long, Dylan and Byron had worn trails throughout our property. They had tremendous freedom to roam; on the other hand, the new house was so remote that their activities in town had to be scheduled so Tom or I could provide transportation. The boys couldn’t simply get on their bikes to visit friends, or ride to the corner for an ice cream. Our relative isolation in the country meant the two boys spent a great deal of time together.
As he grew, Dylan took a lot of pride in his independence. To my amusement, he asked me to show him how to do his own laundry when he was ten. That independence, combined with the determination we’d seen when he was young, made him a force to be reckoned with. I remember taking him and Byron to the roller rink. I wasn’t an accomplished skater by any stretch of the imagination, but I could stay on my feet, and I offered to help Dylan, who was struggling to stay on his. He insisted he could do it alone, and so I dutifully planted myself against the railing as he stumbled away from me. He took a few halting steps on his skates without gliding, and then fell, hard, to the floor. I rushed to help, but he waved me off impatiently. “I can skate. You wait here and watch. Don’t move! I don’t need help.”
And so I watched as he crawled on his hands and knees to the ra
iling and pulled himself up. Then he took another few awkward steps before falling again. I held myself back and watched as the tiny figure inched around the huge rink: a few hesitant steps, the inevitable fall, and then the laborious crawl back to the railing. I have absolutely no idea how long it took him to go all the way around. It felt like an hour.
Finally, he lurched up to where I stood. Sweat poured from his face, and tendrils of blond hair stuck to his forehead. I winced to think about the bruises covering his legs under his dusty jeans. Holding the wall to steady himself, his legs shaking with the effort to keep himself upright after all that work, he stood tall and proud in front of me.
“See? I told you I could skate!”
Incidents like this convinced Tom and me that Dylan would be able to accomplish anything he set out to do, if only by sheer force of will. This was the foundation of our belief in him. He had a lot of confidence in himself, and we did too.
Dylan spent fourth, fifth, and sixth grades in a gifted classroom. It was almost a private-school setting: small classes, lots of chess and math games and individual attention. By the end of sixth grade, challenged academically and spending his days with kids who shared his interests, Dylan seemed to be on top of the world. He left a record of the confidence he felt in a drawing: a boy in a plaid shirt, standing on top of a range of yellow, green, and purple mountains, waving to the viewer with a huge smile on his face. The principal of his elementary school chose the picture for the school’s permanent collection, framed it with a gold nameplate, and hung it in the hallway.
After Columbine, afraid someone would destroy or steal it, we asked his favorite teacher to return it to us.
• • •
One of the traits that marked Dylan throughout his life was an exaggerated reluctance to risk embarrassment, something that intensified as he entered adolescence. Both Tom and I are self-deprecating by nature, the first ones to poke fun at ourselves. But Dylan did not laugh easily at his own foibles. He could be unforgiving of himself when he failed at anything, and he hated to look foolish.
One summer afternoon, when Dylan was about eight, we went on a picnic with Judy Brown and her two boys. The kids were catching crayfish in the creek, and Dylan lost his balance on the slippery rocks and fell into the shallow water with a splash. He emerged unhurt but furious: livid about the pratfall, and even angrier that everyone else had laughed. We tried to help him to see the humor in it—Byron would likely have hammed it up further by taking an elaborate bow—but Dylan went to the car and refused to speak to anyone until he felt able to face the world again. The reaction seemed outsized, but it only cemented what we already knew: Dylan felt embarrassment more acutely than other kids did.
When he was about ten and a cousin was visiting from out of state, she and the boys and I went horseback riding together. Midway through our ride, Dylan’s horse stopped in the middle of the trail to pee. Childishly, the rest of us laughed. Dylan’s face grew red and hot with embarrassment, his humiliation growing with every passing second. Still, while Dylan might have been more self-conscious than Byron had been, his insecurities still fell well within normal parameters for a preteen.
By junior high, the gifted program Dylan was in had come to an end. Like many kids that age, he was excruciatingly conscious of anything that might make him stand out from the crowd. In junior high, he told me, it wasn’t cool to be smart.
Despite this, he continued to do well academically. By the time he was in eighth grade, his junior-high math teacher recommended he enroll in an algebra class at Columbine High School. Dylan refused to go. All three of us met with his teacher to weigh the pros and cons. It’s intimidating enough to start high school as a ninth grader, let alone to go there a year early, and the logistics of getting him back and forth safely were complicated. Together we concluded it would be best to let Dylan stay at the junior high for math.
It was a relief to us that Dylan was doing well, because Byron’s entry into adolescence had been challenging. He needed a great deal of parental poking and prodding to get through his daily routines. We’d established clear expectations for the boys when they were young. They were never permitted to speak to us, or to any adult, in a disrespectful way. We asked them to care for their rooms and belongings, and to help us with projects around the house. I expected them to do what they could to stay safe: wear sunscreen, drive responsibly, and say no to drugs. On top of that, they were required to keep up with their schoolwork, and so when Tom and I saw Byron’s high school academic performance (never stellar) decline, we searched his room and discovered he was smoking marijuana.
Marijuana is legal in Colorado now, so our reaction might seemed old-fashioned and outsized, but drugs had never been a part of either of our lives, and we were frankly afraid of them. We’d been pretty closely monitoring Byron’s movements before, but after we found the pot, we got right up on top of him. We searched his room as a matter of routine. We insisted he end friendships we believed weren’t in his best interests. We sent him to see a counselor.
I’m sure we annoyed him beyond measure, but Byron had the same good-natured, loving spirit as always. He was funny and open, and I’d spend hours in his room talking to him, making sure he was okay. There wasn’t a lot of conflict in the house, but Byron was definitely receiving the lion’s share of our parental attention, which may have meant we did not recognize the intensity of Dylan’s emerging needs.
During those trying years, Dylan kept doing what he was supposed to be doing. He seemed to enjoy the role of the cooperative, responsible child, the kid who did the right thing, and Tom and I needed him to fulfill that role more than ever when we were preoccupied with Byron’s welfare. Dylan’s commitment to self-reliance obscured how much he needed help at the end of his life. It unquestionably contributed to our inability to see him as troubled.
In the summer after eighth grade, Dylan began to develop the lean, angular look he’d have for the rest of his life. We wanted to reward his transition into high school, so we offered to send him to a summer camp in the mountains. The camp was rustic, and the kids shouldered the majority of what needed to be done to keep the place running. Dylan never hesitated to complain at home when he felt he’d been assigned more than his fair share of chores, but he had no complaints about camp. He loved being outdoors, and the counselors told us he got along well with the other kids.
• • •
Both of our sons played baseball from the time they were small; the sport was the common thread woven through their childhoods and adolescence. They watched games on television, fought over the sports pages, and took turns going to baseball games with their father. Tom loved the game, and the three of them would spend summer nights playing catch in the backyard, or throwing balls through a plywood sheet Tom had customized for pitching practice. Dylan’s walls were covered with posters of his baseball heroes: Lou Gehrig, Roger Clemens, Randy Johnson. One of our favorite movies was The Natural, which starred Robert Redford as a baseball prodigy. The boys watched it so often that they knew parts by heart.
Baseball was not only a wholesome pastime for the boys; it was a shared love between Tom’s family and my own. One of my grandfathers had been asked to join a professional team as a young man (he declined: he didn’t want to leave his widowed mother), and both Tom’s father and his brother played amateur ball well into their adult years. I loved that our boys played this classic American sport, just as their grandfathers and great-grandfathers had before them. Both Dylan and Tom were devastated when Dylan, entering Columbine High School as a ninth grader, didn’t make the Columbine High School baseball team.
Byron’s smooth right-handed pitch kept him in the game until he grew tired of it. Dylan also pitched, but he was a lefty and fired the ball like a cannon, trying to strike the batter out. Throwing hard was his trademark, and he often sacrificed accuracy for speed. In time, his pitching style took its toll on his arm. The summer before Dylan went into eighth grade, Tom hired a coach to help both boys with
their form. During one of their sessions, Dylan seemed to be struggling. Suddenly, he stopped throwing altogether, his eyes downcast. Tom hurried over, worried he or the coach had pushed Dylan too hard. He saw Dylan’s eyes were filled with tears.
“My arm hurts too much to pitch,” Dylan told his dad.
Tom was shocked. Dylan had never mentioned any pain before, though we later learned it had been going on for months, worsening with each throw. It was typical of Dylan not to mention it: he’d been determined to overcome the problem by force of will. Tom took him to the doctor immediately. Dylan had a painful inflammation around the tendons of the elbow, and the doctor recommended he take a break from baseball. He stayed away until the following summer, when he began to practice for the Columbine High School baseball team tryouts.
Tom had also begun to experience serious joint pain. (Right around the time Dylan was entering high school, Tom was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, and would undergo surgeries on his knees and shoulders in the next few years.) His ability to help Dylan practice was limited as he could no longer throw a ball, so he hired the pitching coach to come back. As it turned out, Dylan’s arm was still sore. The day of the tryouts, the two of them made quite a pair—Dylan favoring his elbow, and Tom’s knees hurting so badly he could barely walk out to the field.
Given his injury, we greeted the news that Dylan hadn’t made the team with mixed emotions. Although disappointed he wouldn’t be participating in a sport in high school, neither Tom nor I wanted to push him into an activity that might cause him lasting physical damage. As a family, we tried to minimize the loss and move on. For his part, Dylan claimed he hadn’t liked some of the kids on the team anyway.
His passion for the sport didn’t come to an end. He still followed professional baseball religiously, and went occasionally to games with his dad; in time, he’d join a fantasy baseball league. Not making the team was a much greater loss than we knew, though, as the focus of his attention shifted from baseball to computers.
Mother's Reckoning : Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy (9781101902769) Page 9