I had been deliberately avoiding news coverage, but in order to write to the families, I needed to know more about their loved ones. So I forced myself to read newspaper articles for information about the teacher and each of the children who had been killed. I never, ever wanted to dehumanize the individuals who had been killed or injured by thinking of them as a collective group—the “victims.” In each case, I needed to know the particular, specific treasure that had been lost.
Sorrow piled on sorrow with every biographical detail I read. Learning what each person had been interested in and what their friends and loved ones said about them broke my heart. The waste of it, the idea that Dylan had robbed innocent people of their precious lives, and of the futures they should have had, was intolerable. How could he have inflicted such pain? How could anyone, raised in our home, have done this?
At times, writing the letters felt like standing dangerously close to a fire, and sometimes I had to step back. Each day, I wanted to run as fast as I could from the task in front of me. But if I did, I knew I would lose my connection to what had happened. Columbine had already become the lightning rod it still is, a symbol in a single word for the hazards of bullying, mental illness, irresponsible parenting, guns. Like everyone else, I believed there were answers to be pursued, but I was not yet ready to take refuge in abstractions. Columbine wasn’t “about” guns or bullying; it was about the fifteen people who were now dead, and the twenty-four who had been injured, some profoundly.
Yet even while I was trying to write coherent letters acknowledging my son’s responsibility, I was clinging ferociously to my denial that Dylan could have been responsible for killing anyone. As I wrote them, I believed with all my heart that the people who sustained mortal wounds had been shot by Eric, not by Dylan. In the letters, I referred to the “role” Dylan played in the tragedy because I still didn’t know what had really happened that day, only that people had been killed and wounded. I referred to a “moment of madness,” because I believed Dylan had to have acted on impulse; it was inconceivable his participation could have been planned ahead of time. I could not yet believe my son was a murderer, because I did not accept that his intent had been to kill.
I feared that many of the families would be insulted by my presumption in reaching out. They would say—correctly—that I did not have the right even to utter their loved one’s name. When I read the first drafts of the letters I had written, I almost threw them away. The words on the paper were shamefully, pitifully inadequate.
But writing them was all that I could think of to do. I could not undo what Dylan and Eric had done. I could not bring back the lives that had been lost, nor heal those who had been wounded physically or psychologically. I was powerless to dampen the aftershocks of the tragedy for myself or anyone else, and I understood I could not control how people would respond. I was not asking for forgiveness, or for understanding, or for anything, except the chance to say that I was sorry.
• • •
Read today that Mr. Rohrbough had destroyed Dylan and Eric’s crosses. I don’t blame him at all. No one should expect the grieving families of victims to embrace Dylan and Eric now. I’d feel the same way.
—Journal entry, May 1999
A week after the shootings, my brother, Phil, came to spend a few days with us. My sister couldn’t join him: one of her teenage children, Dylan’s cousin, had been so traumatized by the news of Dylan’s role that she needed medical attention.
Phil had come to comfort us, but what could he say or do? We were shadow people, ghosts of ourselves, moving through a never-ending twilight characterized by discombobulation, shame, and sorrow. Our days were consumed with legal appointments and the paranoid measures we followed in order to avoid the media and those who might want to harm us.
Dylan’s face was everywhere: Murderer. Terrorist. Neo-Nazi. Outcast. Scum.
Soon after the shootings, we received yet another terrible shock. It was reported that Robyn, Dylan’s prom date, had bought three guns for the boys.
My first thought was, Oh, no. Poor Robyn. In a flash, I could see it: she had done it because they’d asked her to, because she liked them, because she was a nice person. She would never, ever, ever have done it if she’d believed it was unsafe. She’s going to have to live with this for the rest of her life, I thought. Then, for the thousandth time: Look how many people they’ve hurt.
The aftershocks kept coming. Still mostly insulated from news and the outside world, I was only dimly aware of most of them. I didn’t know until a year later that Marilyn Manson had canceled concert dates in our area out of respect, or that the NRA did not cancel their annual meeting, held at a hotel fifteen miles away from the school, just ten days after the shootings.
I did learn that school authorities and police had been told about Eric’s website, the one Judy Brown had told me about on the terrible day of the shootings, and that he’d talked openly on the site about pipe bombs and killing people.
And I saw Dylan on the cover of Time magazine, next to the headline “The Monsters Next Door.” Despite the monstrous nature of what he had done, it hurt me terribly to see that word used to describe him and utterly surreal to see his face under the iconic logo. It was still hard to believe Dylan had done something horrendous enough that the neighbors would know about it, let alone the entire world.
I read the article. The next day, I wrote:
Depression really kicked in when I read the Time Magazine article yesterday. They made Dylan sound human, like a nice kid gone astray. This hurts more than the villain portrayal because it shows how totally senseless it all was. He didn’t have to do any of this. He was so close to a life away from high school. If he was depressed, he didn’t show us.
A makeshift memorial had been erected in town, consisting of fifteen rough-hewn wooden crosses, one for each person who had died, including Dylan and Eric. Immediately, Dylan’s and Eric’s crosses were chopped down and thrown in a dumpster. A church group planted fifteen commemorative trees in a circle on their property, and police and congregation members stood helplessly by while two were felled.
Of course, I understood why people did not want Dylan and Eric to be mourned or memorialized, but this unchallenged display of anger frightened us. Within a few days of his arrival, my brother accepted an offer to sleep at a neighbor’s house. He urged us to leave with him. “You’re in such a state of shock, you can’t see how dangerous this is.”
We were in shock, but the bigger issue was that we just didn’t care. One particularly bad night, Tom said wearily, “I wish he’d killed us, too.” It was a thought we would have on many occasions over the years.
A reporter got ahold of our phone records and called everyone we’d communicated with over the previous months. Our friends and family members were already inundated, but now the press started showing up at the two apartment buildings we owned to question our tenants. We’d worked hard to build a family business, and the safety and comfort of our tenants was a priority, but they were being harassed simply because they’d had the misfortune of moving into one of our properties. We didn’t see a way to protect them, so we moved forward to sell the buildings.
We considered leaving the area, but as hostile as the larger world was toward us, our own inner circle became an invaluable source of support. For more than a decade, our lives had been in Littleton, and the people we loved rallied immediately to our side. On days when I wasn’t sure I would survive, friends materialized to keep me going.
If God sends us love on earth, I truly believe it is delivered through the actions of people. During that terrible time, we were sustained by the care of those around us. Friends and family members were stalwart with daily calls and hugs. Neighbors delivered home-cooked meals and returned empty serving dishes to their rightful owners. Our friends quickly learned to stop defending us in the press after so many of them saw their words distorted or put into a negative context, but they fiercely protected our property, not only from the media
’s intrusions, but from any stranger who appeared. In the early days, when our phone rang off the hook with interview requests and calls from strangers as well as friends—twenty or thirty calls a day—our closest neighbors bought us a caller ID device so we’d know when it was safe to pick up. After that, we screened every call.
On Mother’s Day after the shootings, a friend who is a talented gardener scoured the bargain section at a local nursery. When I returned home, I was greeted by a profusion of spring color from the neglected pots on my porch: verbena, petunias, dianthus, lobelia, marigolds. It was a gift of beauty, and of herself, and it provided me with the surprising news that I could still appreciate such a thing.
In order to cope with our grief, and to piece together what had been going on in Dylan’s mind, we needed to talk with people who’d known him, but I had no desire to put any of our friends in a position where they might be forced to testify in a trial. (We were not supposed to talk about anything with legal significance, but everything had legal significance.) I’m naturally forthcoming, and was used to sharing my thoughts freely with the people I cared about. Our lawyer told me I could talk about my own feelings, and so I did. The people around me were kind enough to listen, even when I told the same stories over and over again.
All I could do was take and not give back. I had never needed the kindness of others more than I did at that time, and I never did a poorer job of expressing my gratitude. This feeling added to my pervasive sense of guilt. My short-term memory had disappeared. I couldn’t remember whom I’d thanked, or if I’d said anything at all to express my appreciation. I kept a notebook to help me remember what I had said and done, but I’m still convinced I failed to convey my gratitude to everyone who deserved it.
By the end of our first week back home, we knew we couldn’t leave Littleton. The people who knew Dylan before—who remembered the day he pitched a victorious no-hitter, who could laugh about the time he ate an entire bucket of KFC by himself, or who’d been put into stitches by one of his dry asides—they were there, too, willing to share their memories of him. How would we survive without them?
Besides, could we ever truly run from this? There would never be a way to escape from the horror of what Dylan had done. No mere relocation could distance us from the truth, or from its stain. No matter where we went, this horror would follow.
• • •
Wandering around the house alone trying to function.
—Journal entry, April 1999
In the early 1970s, I worked as an art therapist at a psychiatric hospital in Milwaukee. One day I overheard Betty, one of our patients with schizophrenia, say, “I’m just sick and tired of following my face around.” In the weeks and months after Columbine, Betty’s phrase came often to my mind. As my state of shock began to lift incrementally, waves of negative emotions overwhelmed me, and I toggled among debilitating sorrow, fear, anger, humiliation, anxiety, remorse, grief, powerlessness, pain, and hopelessness.
The feelings weren’t new; they’d been my constant companions since I’d gotten that first message at my office from Tom. Whatever protective shield had minimized their impact in the earliest hours was becoming ever less efficient, though. As more days passed, the insulation keeping me from fully experiencing the reality of what Dylan had done began to fall away, and my emotions, when they came, were searing. I could no longer distance myself from the community’s pain, or pretend my son hadn’t caused this agony. Seeing a photograph of a victim’s funeral on the cover of the local paper would leave me unable to move under the crushing weight of my grief and regret. I could barely function.
I had always been hyper-organized and efficient, the kind of person who loves nothing better than sailing through her daily to-do list. In the weeks following Columbine, if I got a single thing done in the course of a day—the dishwasher emptied, a bill paid—it was a good day. I couldn’t yet go back to work, but my career in disability services had at least provided me with a context. The symptoms of intense grief—memory loss, attention deficit, emotional fragility, incapacitating fatigue—are surprisingly similar to those resulting from traumatic brain injury.
Some days, I worried I was losing my link to sanity. One morning, I sat on the edge of the bed trying to get dressed. I put one sock on, then stared into space for an hour before I could put on the other. It took me almost four hours to get dressed. Another afternoon, a friend called to see how I was doing. “I do nothing. Why am I so tired?” I asked, genuinely bewildered. She spoke from her own experience with loss: “You’re not doing nothing. You’re grieving, and it’s hard work.” My grief for Dylan was at the heart of everything. It would have been crushing under any circumstances, but it was further compounded by my lack of comprehension, and by my feelings of guilt over the destruction he had wrought. My world had been rocked off its axis.
Friends who knew I often turned to art in times of trouble brought me art books and new sketchbooks to tempt me, but it was impossible for me to open them. Wearing bright colors made me feel physically ill. A life once filled with work and family activities and house maintenance and art and friends had come to a screeching halt. The long evening walks I took with our neighbors in the cliffs surrounding our home provided my only relief.
At the beginning of May, the school decided Dylan’s closest circle of friends would not be allowed to attend their own graduation ceremony, scheduled for the end of the month.
At first, the unfairness of the decision aroused a real anger in me, and a sense of protectiveness for Dylan’s friends. They were good kids and they were hurting, too. Most of them had reached out to us to offer their support, and to tell us they’d been as blindsided as we had been. A number of them had come over to our house, bearing photographs and videos of Dyl, and cards he’d given them. Zack’s girlfriend, Devon, made a book for us of photographs and written memories, mounted on paper she’d made herself. There was Dylan—grinning while pushing Zack’s dad into the pool; sporting a Hawaiian shirt and a bunch of leis at a costume party Devon had thrown; clowning around with Zack and making a hokey thumbs-up sign for the camera. I spent hours poring over these artifacts, desperate for confirmation that the sensitive, fun-loving kid Tom and I remembered had been real.
Upon reflection, my anger about graduation abated, and a grim resignation took its place. Who was I to be angry, even on someone else’s behalf? These were extraordinary circumstances. There was no manual for how to proceed in the wake of the worst school shooting in history.
Afterward, Dylan’s friends scattered like beads from a broken necklace. Not surprisingly, many of them suffered serious difficulties for years. Nate stopped by our house on his way out of town. He asked for an item to remember his friend by, a request that moved me, and I was happy to see him choose a pair of Dylan’s sunglasses—they reminded us both of Dylan, in happier times.
But Nate had something to tell us, too. He’d seen Dylan give a large wad of money to a guy they worked with at Blackjack Pizza. When Nate pressed him, Dylan told him the money was for a gun.
We were dumbfounded by this news. Even Tom was willing to finally express anger toward Dylan for lying to us. We had been clinging to the belief that Dylan was an innocent victim, ensnared by Eric at the last minute—and yet here was evidence that he had taken an active role in buying a gun, more evidence that my son had not been the person I thought he was.
A month after the shootings, I sent the letters I had written to the families of the people who had been killed. Our lawyer watched the news for a response. (I still couldn’t turn on the television.) As we had expected, the families’ reactions were wildly diverse. Some appreciated the effort. Others were angry; at least one of the families tore my letter up, unread. There was no single point of view. In the weeks and months and years to come, when an individual or family acted aggressively, it helped me to remember they did not necessarily represent all the families involved.
I received two written responses from victims’ families in the mo
nths that followed. One letter was from the teenaged sibling of one of the murdered girls. She said she did not blame us for the tragedy, and I wept with sadness and joy. Then, on my birthday eleven months later, we received a letter from the father of one of the boys who was killed in the school library. He reached out with compassion and said he wished he could help us in some way. The letter felt like a gift from heaven. We got permission from our lawyer to write back, but we did not meet for several years because of the many lawsuits against our family.
The small sense of accomplishment I’d gained from sending the letters to the victims’ families was short-lived. There were far more losses than the thirteen who had been killed. I felt I also needed to write to the twenty-four others who had been injured. There were students who would never walk again, and those who would live in constant pain. After years of working with students living with disabilities, I had an idea of the hardships the injured students and their families would have to endure. I thought of the physical and psychological agony they must be experiencing, and the ongoing drain on financial resources. Some would have to adjust to new identities that would affect every aspect of their lives. Even if we were held financially responsible, there was not enough money in the world to relieve the suffering Dylan had caused.
The second set of letters—to the families of surviving victims—took many more weeks for me to write than the first. Again, I was struck by the inadequacy of my message, and by the flimsiness of mere words in the face of everything that had been lost. How dare I interject myself into their lives? But I felt I had to do something.
• • •
I’m sick of waking up each day with a broken heart, of missing Dylan and wanting to scream loud enough to wake up from the nightmare my life has become. I want to hold Dylan in my arms again, to cuddle him as I did years ago, to hold him in my lap and help him with his shoes or a puzzle. I want to talk to him, and stop him from even considering this horrible act.
Mother's Reckoning : Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy (9781101902769) Page 11