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

by Klebold, Sue; Solomon, Andrew (INT)

  —Journal entry, May 1999

  During our first days back at home, we had made disjointed efforts to reclaim the house, but Dylan’s room remained as the police had left it, with his possessions spilling out onto the mezzanine, and his stripped mattress leaning against the upstairs banister.

  In the month after his death, I began to make daily forays into the room, putting a few things in order before the strength of my feelings overwhelmed me and I had to flee. I lingered in particular over Dylan’s bathroom sink. Wisps of his blond hair remained in his comb, and his whiskers filled an electric razor we’d bought him.

  It wasn’t only the strength of my grief that held me back from doing more. Every time I disinfected a surface or laundered a hamper of dirty clothes, I was destroying traces Dylan had left behind. The idea of erasing him broke my heart, and I worried that with every emptied wastebasket I was losing opportunities to understand the last hours of his life. Of course, the investigators had taken everything they thought might be relevant, but I was still searching for answers in the wreckage left behind.

  I was no closer to understanding what he had been thinking and feeling, or how the kid I loved and raised could have participated in an atrocity like this. What could possibly explain his state of mind? Had there been drugs in his system, undetected by the autopsy? Had there been outside influences? Organized crime, perhaps? Even if Eric had masterminded a plan and urged Dylan to participate, Dylan was a smart kid. He could have found a way to get himself out of it if he wanted to. Why hadn’t he? Had Eric coerced or threatened him? Had Dylan been brainwashed? At one point, Byron asked seriously if Dylan could have been possessed. A month before, I would have laughed out loud at such a ridiculous idea, but in our new reality, demonic possession seemed as plausible an answer as any.

  We had no gravesite, so I spent hours in Dylan’s room trying to intuit the answers to the questions plaguing us. I was shocked to find a pack of cigarettes in one of his drawers. Not long before he died, I’d thought I smelled tobacco on him, and asked him outright if he was smoking. He gave me an exasperated look and said, “I’m not that stupid!” It seemed as if he had real disdain for the practice, and I’d believed him. The cigarettes in his drawer suggested he’d straight-out lied.

  I was also saddened to find a nearly empty bottle of St. John’s-wort in Dylan’s medicine cabinet. I’d been in his bathroom lots of times in the previous months, to make sure he was keeping it clean, but I’d never looked inside the medicine cabinet. St. John’s-wort is a natural antidepressant found at health food stores and drugstores. Here was bald, incontrovertible evidence that Dylan had been depressed enough to try to alleviate those feelings through medication. The expiration date on the bottle indicated he’d had it a long time.

  I was beginning to appreciate how gullible I had been. Our mail was filled with letters from people, mostly adults, confessing the illicit activities they’d hidden from their parents when they were themselves teenagers: sexual exploits, drug use, theft. A few of the stories were funny—foolish adolescent decisions with happy endings. (One letter writer had been apprehended by the police on the roof of his childhood home without any pants on.) But most were tragic, and represented years of painful silence.

  This collective unburdening was taking place in our own circle of friends, too. Almost everyone who visited told me something they’d hidden from their parents during their teenage years: drinking and drug use, a road trip to Vegas, years of drugstore shoplifting, a much-older boyfriend. Prompted by the events at Columbine, one friend finally admitted to his father (and to us) that as a young boy he had been sexually molested by their neighbor over a period of years. I caught myself silently wondering what everyone in the world was wondering about me: How could his dad not have noticed something so huge?

  We also received a letter, postmarked April 27, 1999, which I reprint here with permission of the author, although I have changed names and places to protect the privacy of those involved. It came from Cindy Worth, a woman of about our age. Tom had known her family growing up, and had stayed in touch with them through the years. We both admired the Worths; they were successful and happy, pillars of their church—good people—and I was always struck by how loving and close they were to one another.

  With real sadness and alarm, we read the following:

  Dear Tom, Sue and Byron,

  Forgive me for the length of this letter, but there is so much to say. I hope that by sharing my story with you, you will find some comfort and peace and better understand why Dylan didn’t talk to you about the pain and anger he was suffering.

  Mom and Dad moved to Colorado [when] I was 14 years old. Almost from the start, I was harassed by a group of boys who called me “Flipper” because my nose is long. They would walk behind me in the school hallways and sing the theme song to the Flipper TV show. They hung used tampons and kotex in my locker, and stole letters from my notebook. They read unmailed letters to my friends back home in the boy’s locker room before football practice.

  The culmination to the harassment occurred when I was raped by a football player. He boasted to his friends that it would have been “better” had he not looked at my ugly face.

  I never told Mom and Dad—not until a couple of days ago. I wanted them to know—and I want you to know—why I didn’t tell them. It might help to understand why Dylan didn’t talk to you about his problems.

  I felt a tremendous amount of shame about being a target of harassment and assault. I can tell you from first-hand experience that young people blame themselves for the pain they suffer. I believed there must have been something wrong with me for people to treat me this way.

  I wanted Mom and Dad to think the best of me. I assumed that if I told them what happened, they would think of me as I thought of myself—flawed and ugly.

  I was too young and confused to recognize that what had happened was a crime. I thought that if I told anyone, the taunting would get worse.

  I suffered in silence for about 3 months, all the while becoming more and more depressed. I was contemplating suicide when I met someone who, literally, saved my life.

  Ken was a funny-looking, outgoing, joyful kind of guy, somewhat of an outsider himself, but it didn’t seem to bother him. He sought me out and became my friend. After several weeks I felt safe enough with him to tell him what happened. This sweet, gentle 14-year-old boy had enough wisdom to listen and hug me while I shed gallons of tears. Ken grew up to become a minister. He was and always will be MY minister.

  This is what SHOULD have happened for Dylan. A friend, a peer, should have been there for him. A friend who could guide Dylan away from anger and depression, not feed it.

  Please know this. This friend could not have been you, Tom and Sue, as his parents. Or you, Byron, as his brother. The process of growing up and separation makes it extremely difficult for children to seek out their parents and siblings for help with these hidden, painful problems.

  I believe with every fiber in my body and stirring in my soul that Dylan is with the Lord and that we will see him and rejoice with him again.

  I love you. We love you. We are lifting you up.

  Cindy

  Tom and I reread this letter many times. Tom had known Cindy her whole life; I’d known her more than twenty years. Our children had celebrated their birthdays together. Neither of us would ever have imagined she’d experienced anything such as she described—either the bullying or the rape—or that she’d been so close to suicide. We spoke to her devastated parents a week or two later. They had also been utterly shocked by what they’d learned.

  Among other things, Cindy’s letter validated for us how a child’s personal devastation could go undetected by the most watchful parents, teachers, and peers if they chose to keep it concealed. I had been a teacher at the college level for most of my career, and knew well that young adults snuck around, hiding six-packs of beer and furtive smooches in the parking lot. Still, I would not have thought it possible for a ki
d to hide an event as earthshaking as rape, or thoughts and feelings as serious as suicidal ideation, especially from parents like the Worths. Each day brought a new shock to illuminate how painfully naive—and dangerous—this belief of mine had been.

  More than anything, Cindy’s letter made me long to talk with Dylan. A running dialogue with him played in my head like background music in a constant, exhausting loop. In the earliest days at Ruth and Don’s house, my doctor had written me a prescription for anti-anxiety medication. I took it only once. The tamping down of my anxiety sent my grief surging full-force to the surface. I was unable to stop crying, as if a tap had gotten stuck in the “on” position. After that, I had decided to live with my emotions without medication.

  There was no point, I was beginning to realize, in trying to avoid or outrun the confusion or the grief. The best I could do was simply try to survive it—and, in the months and years to come, to do everything in my power to understand all the things I had not known about my son.

  CHAPTER 8

  A Place of Sorrow

  This library had been a place for innocent children, a place where they should have been safe, and now they were all dead.

  —Journal entry, June 1999

  In early June of 1999, we read in the newspaper that family members of the victims were being invited to visit the school library, where many of their children had died, before renovations gutted the room.

  I knew Dylan could never be considered a victim of Columbine, and we understood why we had not been contacted. Yet we needed to see the place where Dylan had taken his own life, and the lives of so many others. Our lawyer spoke to the sheriff’s department and arranged a visit. We had been living more or less in hiding since the shootings, so we met the lawyers in the parking lot of a hardware store in order to switch cars. The cloak-and-dagger routine, for once, did not feel absurd.

  The school was still a crime scene. As soon as I saw the yellow tape, my heart thundered in my chest. As we walked through the corridors, we saw construction workers repairing the damage Dylan and Eric had caused. Patches of black soot on the carpets, walls, and ceilings showed where they had tossed small explosives as they walked through the school. Ceiling tiles had been removed, and sections of the carpets. Sheets of clear plastic covered shattered windows. Not for the first or last time, I was dumbfounded by the magnitude of the damage my son had caused. Workers looked down at us from ladders, and I wondered if they knew who we were.

  The library door was locked, covered with a sheet of plastic, and swathed in yellow police tape. Before we entered, the sheriff’s department told us we were there to see where our son had died, and that was all. I felt grateful for the professionalism of the police, and for the respect they showed to all the victims.

  I was trembling when we entered. Always looking for answers, I wanted to believe that seeing where Dylan and the others had died would provide me with a revelation, some insight. I hoped I would walk into the room and understand something vital about the events of that day, and about Dylan’s state of mind, and I tried to set my sorrow aside so I could receive any truth occupying the space.

  The moment I walked into the room, everything fell silent. I could no longer hear the repairs being made in the hallway. I sensed only two things before I was overtaken by tears. I felt the presence of children, and I felt peace.

  The police led us to the place where Eric and Dylan had shot themselves. My heart caught when I saw the long, lean, angular shape marked out on the floor. Of course that was Dylan; it looked just like him. My tears splashed the floor. Byron’s gentle hand was on my back as I knelt beside the shape resembling my son and touched the carpet that held him when he fell.

  CHAPTER 9

  Life with Grief

  Quote in the paper about cancer patients. It said “The people who do well create a place in their mind and their spirit where they are well, and they live from that place.” This is what we are doing. Tom’s analogy is that a tornado has destroyed our house, and we can only live in one part of it. This is what living with grief is like. You dwell in that small place where you can function.

  —Journal entry, August 1999

  The theologian C. S. Lewis begins A Grief Observed, his beautiful meditation on the death of his wife, with these words: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”

  Years later, those words still hit me with the full weight of the unassailably true. Any loved one’s death, especially the death of a child, shakes you at your very foundation. As Iris Bolton, a suicide loss survivor and author, has written, “I thought I was immortal, that my children and my family were also, that tragedy happened only to others.” We need to believe this in order to survive, and the truth laid bare can be terrifying. For me, the incomprehensibility of the way Dylan died magnified these feelings of instability at the foundation of my identity by throwing everything I believed to be true about the life I’d lived, about my family, and about myself into question.

  One of the students I worked with when I was still at the community college shared with me one of the most difficult things about living with her disability.

  “Everyone sees the disability first. To them, I’m an amputee before I’m a person,” she told me.

  At the time, I was grateful to her for the insight because I knew it would help me in my work. After Columbine, though, I knew exactly what she meant. I was certain I would always be seen as the woman who raised a murderer, and that no one—including me—would ever see me as anything else.

  • • •

  Though I was fifty years old, in the months after Columbine I felt keenly the loss of my own parents. I was grateful they hadn’t lived to see what my life had become but longed, childlike, for the simple reassurance of their presence.

  My father died when I was eighteen, but I was thirty-eight when I lost my mother, and I relied on her long after I became an adult. At her funeral, my siblings and I referred to her as the North Star, a tribute to her unerring gift for helping us to find our bearings in life even in the most turbulent of circumstances. I suspect that is why, in the months and years after Columbine, I dreamed about her almost as often as I dreamed about Dylan.

  In one dream I had soon after the tragedy, it was night and a cold wind was blowing. I was searching for my car in an enormous parking lot while clutching Dylan, about two years old, in my arms. I tried to wrap a blanket around him to keep him warm as I walked up and down the rows looking for the car in increasing desperation, but huge, heavy shopping bags filled with papers hung from my arms. These made it so difficult to carry Dylan that I worried I would drop him onto the pavement.

  Just as he was beginning to slip from my grasp, my mother stepped forward. She said, “Give me the bags. You take care of your son.” One by one, she lifted the heavy handles cutting into my wrists and arms, allowing me to hold Dylan tightly, and wrap the blanket securely around him. I found our car and placed Dylan safely in his car seat while my mother stood by, holding the bags she’d taken from me. Then I woke up.

  The dream revealed the path I needed to follow. The papers in the bags represented everything pulling me away from my grief: worry about the lawsuits, money concerns, fear of seeing my name in the newspapers, the thousands of letters and bills and notices and legal documents taking over our den in enormous drifts of fear and obligation. It was easy for me to get overwhelmed by the constant media assault, the world’s hatred and blame, not to mention my constant anxiety that something terrible would happen to Byron. Our financial situation emerged as completely disastrous, and so complicated that it seemed we would never dig ourselves out of the hole.

  But my mother was right. I had to focus on grieving for Dylan and his victims, and let go of everything else.

  That was difficult. Even if I hadn’t been incapacitated by grief, the sheer administrative weight of what we were dealing with would have overwhelmed me. A month after the tragedy, Tom and I were still wandering the rooms of our empty house like ghosts,
dazed by loss and remorse, haunted by the same circular thoughts. I miss Dylan. How could he do such a horrible thing? I can’t believe I’ll never see him again. How could someone I loved so much murder people in cold blood? Other children? If only I’d known, said the magic words, done whatever it took to stop him. How could he have done such a thing?

  And then, always, always, the impossibility and permanence of the loss: How can it be possible I will never again feel his scratchy cheek against mine?

  Periodically, we’d be jolted back into a kind of frenetic energy—if not by a renewed realization of what Dylan had done, then by the myriad ways the ramifications of his actions would destroy the home and the life and the family we’d spent twenty-seven years building. Though Gary Lozow significantly discounted his legal services, the first bill we received shocked us into reality. We had absolutely no idea how we would pay it. In that instance, my mother stepped forward from the grave to help us. Before she died in 1987, when the boys were small, she bought life insurance policies for both of them. Dylan’s two policies were paid out to us after his death, and they exactly covered the amount of that first bill.

  It was only a drop in the bucket, though, and there would be years of legal bills ahead. Tom tried to find consulting work in the oil field, but there were few opportunities, and those that did come up disappeared quickly when potential investors learned he was the father of one of the shooters in the Columbine tragedy.

  Our insurance company took some time to decide whether they would cover our legal expenses at all. When they finally agreed to, we learned they wouldn’t cover our working with Gary. This was devastating, as he’d come to feel more like a trusted friend than an attorney—an oasis of sanity in the madness. Starting over with outsiders was emotionally difficult, but our new attorneys, Frank Patterson and Gregg Kay, were compassionate and patient with us as we showed them family photos and talked about our lives with Dylan. I needed to feel they knew us as a family, that they knew Dylan. Before long, we grew comfortable with them.