Mother's Reckoning : Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy (9781101902769)

by Klebold, Sue; Solomon, Andrew (INT)

  —Journal entry, May 11, 1999

  There is a scene at the end of the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indiana Jones is tied, back to back, to the heroine of the movie. They can do nothing but close their eyes as vicious flying spirits unleash a storm of destruction around them. Tom and I were similarly tied to each other, utterly exposed and unable to escape, and we did not know if there would be anything left of our lives when the hurricane passed. Our grief only increased with each revelation about Dylan.

  Immediately after the shootings, we went to one of the therapists recommended in a letter from the county coroner. Tom and Byron went a few times but soon came to the conclusion that the sessions weren’t helping. I stayed with it longer, though the therapist and I were barely scratching the surface of my pain. He seemed overwhelmed by our situation, and by the magnitude of what we were dealing with. He read the papers, watched the news, and surfed the Internet to gauge the world’s reaction. When I walked into a counseling session, he would swivel away from his computer and allude to the threats made against us in the press or online. I was trying to insulate myself from that kind of fear and negativity, so these reports made me anxious. I’m sure the therapist was simply concerned about our safety, but at times he seemed considerably more preoccupied with the external factors around us than with my emotional state.

  We did a few exercises to deal with grief, such as writing letters to Dylan, but Tom and I could not begin the hard work of facing the loss of a child. How could we? We were swept away by the madness engulfing us. Our grief for Dylan was buried under the difficulties of living with the life he had created for us.

  It was becoming increasingly clear, too, that Tom and I were going in different directions with our pain. Tom’s a born entrepreneur with none of my innate caution, always happy to dig into a new project without stopping to worry about how difficult or expensive it will be to complete. I’d fallen in love with his creativity, and had been enthralled by his risk-taking and lack of fear. We had always been strongly attracted to each other, and we shared the same sense of humor. Who you are dictates how you proceed through the grief process, though, and the extremity of the situation we were in began to highlight how different Tom and I really were.

  Tom was looking for an explanation: bullies, the school, the media, Eric. None of that made sense to me. Although I was still maintaining some level of denial about the degree to which Dylan had been involved, it was easier for me to believe he had been crazy—or even evil—than to pretend anything he’d experienced could justify what he’d done.

  While I took comfort from our visitors, Tom found it easier to be alone. It seemed to me that he wanted to control the lawyers working with us, whereas I was painfully aware we were out of our depth and felt grateful when a professional with expertise could tell us what to do.

  Our marriage had been successful for almost thirty years because we complemented each other. But after Columbine, we couldn’t seem to agree about anything. We were both riding the same roller coaster, but we were never in the same place at the same time. If Tom was sad, I was angry. If I was angry, he was sad. I’d always been able to brush off Tom’s cranky moods, and to laugh at his colorful rants. When you’re grieving in such an extreme way, though, your tolerance for stress is diminished. It was like the skin had been flayed right off me, leaving no layer of protection between me and overwhelming emotion. In my journal, I wrote:

  Tom’s words sound like a jackhammer to me, even those uttered most quietly. His thoughts are never aligned with mine. They always come from far away, and they’re totally foreign to my thinking.

  Our relationship with Byron was strained, too. He’d moved back home several weeks after his brother’s death. By that time, he’d lived in his own apartment for two years and had grown used to being independent. Tom and I couldn’t stop wringing our hands and prying into his personal life; we thought our failure to pry into Dylan’s had caused Columbine. But we were barely rational, a point brought home to us one night when Byron went out to dinner with a friend.

  The weather was bad, and Tom and I couldn’t sleep for worrying about the treacherous conditions on the winding roads leading up to our house. We finally heard Byron’s car pull into our drive around eleven, but he didn’t come into the house as we expected. Instead, we heard strange clinking sounds from our garage, and then his car pulled out again at top speed.

  We panicked. Our heads were filled with worst-case scenarios: weapons, drugs, suicide, theft, murder. Had Byron come home for a hidden gun or other contraband? Had he stashed illegal materials in our garage? Should we call the police?

  Twenty minutes later, over the sound of our pounding hearts, we heard Byron’s car pull in at a more leisurely speed. He was badly startled to find the two of us, wild-eyed in our pajamas, waiting for him at the top of the stairs. The proverbial hooves we’d heard had been a horse, not a zebra: on his way home, Byron had passed a car that had skidded off the slick road. He’d come home to get a chain from the garage so he could help the other driver out of the ditch.

  After that night, I extracted a promise from him that he would never intentionally hurt himself or anyone else. I was surprised to find he needed the same reassurance from me. We were beginning to fall into the complicated pattern that would define our relationship in the years after the shootings, even as we became closer than we’d ever been. I’d encourage him to talk about his feelings, but when he confessed to despair (rational, under the circumstances), I worried he’d harm himself. It was a terribly unfair position to put him in. I was asking him to reassure me he was okay—really, I was asking him to be okay—when of course he was not. It would take us a long time to find a way to talk about our devastation while assuring one another we were still committed to life.

  In reality, I am not sure we were. On many days, dying seemed easier than living. All three of us talked about death, ashes, epitaphs, the meaning of life. Tom said he knew what his last words would be: “Thank God it’s over.”

  • • •

  I read mail for five hours, crying nearly the whole time. Two boxes now, one from the post office and one from the lawyer. So many cards and letters of love and support, and yet one hate letter and I am shattered.

  —Journal entry, May 1999

  Much has been written about the need most people have, in the aftermath of a tragedy like Columbine, to assign blame. Whether it was the scale of the tragedy, or the senselessness, or a thousand other reasons I can think of, Columbine became—and remains—a lightning rod. People blamed video games, movies, music, bullying, access to guns, unarmed teachers, the absence of prayer in schools, secular humanism, psychiatric medication. Mostly, though, they blamed us.

  To me, that made sense. If I had been sitting in my living room, shaking out the pages of the freshly delivered Rocky Mountain News with Dylan bagging up the kitchen garbage behind me and Byron happily and untidily ensconced in his apartment across town, I would have blamed us too.

  Didn’t I wonder about a criminal’s family whenever I heard about a terrible act of violence? Didn’t I think, What on earth did the parents do to that poor child so he could grow up to do something like that? A child raised with love, in a loving home, could never have done such a thing. For years, and without a second thought, I’d accepted explanations laying the blame squarely with the criminal’s family. Obviously, the parents had been oblivious, irresponsible, secretly abusive. Of course the mother had been a shrew, a smotherer, a doormat.

  That was why I was so surprised when people we’d never met began to reach out to our family, in sympathy both for our loss and for our predicament. It is also why I have such esteem and appreciation for the victims’ families who reached out without blame. They cannot know, as I do, what it is to be the mother of a killer, yet they are able to operate from a place of compassion. That is remarkable to me. It is something I am not sure I would have been able to do.

  Just days after the shootings, our lawyer handed us a card
board box containing a hand-painted ceramic angel, a frozen dinner of creamed chicken and biscuits, and a few condolence cards—all gestures of sympathy from people we had never met. That trickle of consideration turned into a stream, and then a flood. People wrote from all over the country, and the world. All they needed was our name and “Littleton, CO” on the envelope, and their words and gifts found their way to us.

  A lot of the mail came from people Tom and I had known at various times in our lives: elementary school classmates, teachers, coworkers, and former students. Some were from families in the area whose kids had known Dylan, sharing their memories of him. I read those many times. Lots of the letters were from strangers, though, and a great many of them were anonymous. We received prayers, poems, books, plaques, toys, children’s drawings, and handmade objects. People made charitable donations in Dylan’s memory. They sent cash and checks, which we returned.

  People from all walks of life wrote to us: clergymen, attorneys, teachers, social workers, policemen, United States Marines, and prisoners. The generosity was astonishing. People offered legal services, confidential talks, massages, and private cabins where we could hide from the press.

  A great many people wrote to tell us they were dismayed to see local memorials held for thirteen and not fifteen victims. They wrote to let me know their own religious organizations or social groups had remembered all fifteen—at concerts where Dylan’s name had been read out with the names of the other victims, or masses where prayers had been said for his soul. I was grateful for those letters. For me, there had been fifteen victims. Although I understood the response in my own community, it was still hard for me to accept that Dylan’s entire life had no value at all because of what he had done before he died.

  It had been reported extensively in the media that Dylan and Eric had been bullied, and so we received letters from people of all ages who had been bullied in high school. I did not know Dylan had been bullied, and the shock of needing to readjust my image of him was extreme. Regardless, I was moved by the letter writers’ descriptions of the blind rage, depression, and helplessness that result from feeling so powerless. “I’m not surprised it happened. I’m surprised it didn’t happen at my school, too, and that it doesn’t happen every day at schools across America,” one young man wrote, after sharing his own high school experiences of being afraid to go to the bathroom or walk the halls. Young people wrote directly to Dylan, pouring out their sorrow and hatred for their own school culture, and I wondered if anyone around them knew of the grief they were carrying inside.

  Many of the people who wrote shared personal experiences of loss. Some wrote about their own family’s experience with mental illness and suicide. Those letters helped me tremendously, as did the ones where parents and grandparents shared stories about hardship and humiliation caused by a family member.

  A minister wrote to share that his son was serving a life sentence for murder. I read that letter often. One of the (many) things I felt guilt about in the wake of the tragedy was my fear that I had failed to impart a proper religious education. I had taught Dylan right from wrong every minute of the day, but we hadn’t regularly attended a church or a synagogue since the boys were small. It was silly—a single example was no kind of sample size—yet I took great comfort from knowing that in this one instance, at least, regular Sunday school hadn’t been enough to stop a child from making a terrible choice.

  Our lawyer assigned a member of his staff to go through and remove any hate mail or death threats. Despite his efforts to shield us, we did receive hate mail. And one negative letter obliterated the positive effects of hundreds of supportive ones.

  One letter writer demanded in black marker: “HOW COULD YOU NOT KNOW??!”

  It was, of course, the question I asked myself day and night. I had not imagined myself to be a perfect parent, by any stretch of the imagination. I did, however, believe my close connection (and not just to Dylan, but to both of my sons) meant I would be able to intuit if something was wrong, especially if something was very wrong. I would never have told you I had access to Dylan’s every thought and feeling, but I would have said, with confidence, that I knew exactly what he was capable of. And I would have been wrong.

  “There but for the grace of God, go I,” one mother wrote. She was living with a violent, mentally ill child, and described eloquently how she woke up every day dreading a phone call bearing terrible news about her son, like the one I had received from Tom. It was a sentiment many others would echo over the years. One letter offered prayers of support, and was signed From a Death Row Mom.

  We received a few letters from the families of victims of other shootings. One man’s son was killed in junior high school, and he eloquently shared his initial feelings of outrage, pain, and numbness. That letter gave me a little insight into what the victims’ families might be suffering. People wrote who had lost a child, like the young mother whose toddler suffered a fatal head injury when she fell within reach of family members. Those letters enabled me to connect to the part of me that was simply grieving Dylan. Of course, we heard from many people who had lost loved ones to suicide. I couldn’t yet fully understand Dylan’s death as a suicide, but those letters helped me to begin. I would later have the opportunity to meet many of the people who wrote.

  Though we were isolated from our local community in many ways, these letters helped me to feel kinship with others on a global scale. Many more people than I’d ever imagined had experienced extreme hardships and loss. There was a devastating amount of pain out there in the world. It was as if we had tapped in to a deep wellspring of universal suffering. I wondered daily at people’s compassion, and at their generosity. One card read simply, “God Bless Your Family,” in the painstaking and shaky handwriting of a very elderly person, and I marveled at the enormous and possibly painful effort a stranger across the country had made—to get the card and the stamp, to write the note, to mail it—just so I would not feel so alone. These were people with an emotional bandwidth, a depth and breadth of understanding, that had come from pain in their own lives.

  Unfortunately, it was still too early for me to take comfort from the stories of their survival. I still did not believe there would be an “after.”

  Like so many things that happened to us after the shootings, there was no way to respond normally to the mail we were getting. I responded personally to the first notes, and intended to continue, but the boxes of mail came, and came, and came. My grandfather had once written a thank-you note in response to a particularly beautiful thank-you note he’d received, so this failure to acknowledge the generosity of people who’d reached out landed hard with me. I hated the idea that people who had taken the time and made the effort to express sympathy would go without thanks, but I simply couldn’t keep up.

  I stacked the letters around us, filling plastic bins to sort and organize them, until they took over our family room. I developed a triage system to prioritize those requiring a personal response, with people who had shared their own despair and suicidal thoughts at the top. I responded to many of the letters, but it was only a small percentage. I stopped counting cards and letters when they reached 3,600, and they continued to arrive long after I was no longer counting.

  My guilt was amplified by the scathing criticism we were receiving from every quarter. We were pilloried daily in the press, often for decisions I didn’t even fully understand. For example, our attorneys advised us to file our intent to put the sheriff’s department on notice, a routine legal strategy to keep our options open if new information about the case became available. Through it all, we would maintain a positive working relationship with the sheriff’s department, continuing to communicate and eager to help in any way we could. But the stories in the media came quickly after the decision, and made it seem as if we were going to sue the sheriff’s department for what our son had done. News stories like this one drew an astonishing amount of vitriol. “Those parents are disgusting,” one person seethed on a talk r
adio broadcast I accidentally heard while changing radio stations in my car. People thought we should be jailed, hunted like animals, tortured, shot. I still can’t look at comment sections of articles about Columbine.

  I was never able to escape the humiliation and fear that such remarks left behind. I’d always thought of myself as a good citizen and a good mother, and now I was being paraded through town as the worst parent who’d ever lived. For the first time in my life, I was living as an outcast, judged and rejected by others for circumstances over which I had no control. Dylan had unwittingly provided an opportunity for us to understand how he must have felt during the last years of his life.

  We lived in a small psychological space following Dylan’s death: one in which we were still attentive, well-meaning, loving parents who had lost our son. The only way we could survive was by minimizing our exposure to the negativity, and so we withdrew. Every time someone attempted to speak on our behalf, their words were twisted and misrepresented in the media. So we surrounded ourselves with friends and locked ourselves away from the rest of the world. We did not respond to even the most egregious accusations.

  I am not sure refusing to engage was the best strategy. Our failure to speak up in our own defense made people believe we were hiding secrets. It felt, and still feels, wrong to let untruths stand—especially since many of the misconceptions about our family and how we raised Dylan are perceived to be true to this day.

  • • •

  I’m tired of being strong. I can’t be strong any more. I can’t face or do anything. I’m lost in a deep chasm of sorrow. I have 17 phone messages and don’t have the energy to listen to them. Dylan’s room is just as the law enforcement people left it, and I can’t face putting it in order.