One told me, “You can’t laugh and cry at the same time.” Laughter, I found, helped me to recalibrate the gyroscope inside me that was swinging so wildly. I started to seek out Seinfeld reruns, Whose Line Is It Anyway?, movies to crack me up like the absurd spaghetti Western parody They Call Me Trinity. I read books by humorists like Erma Bombeck, Dave Barry, and Bill Bryson. I listened to musical satirists like Weird Al and P. D. Q. Bach, as well as comedy on the radio during my commutes. Comedy became a form of community, too, as the best of it comes from a place of tragedy. Some of the comedians I came to enjoy the most, like Maria Bamford and Rob Delaney, speak openly about their own brain health struggles.
Through other survivors of suicide loss, I learned to find compassion for those who judged me, too.
One day, I heard through the grapevine that a colleague had been overheard saying, “You can’t tell me a mother wouldn’t know her child was dealing with something like this.” It hurt because the woman and I had been friendly. To find out she believed I had known about Dylan’s plans—that I had stood by, idle, while he planned to hurt himself and murder others—put me right back in the rock tumbler I’d been living in since Dylan’s death.
I couldn’t stop perseverating about the comment, and mentioned it to a suicide loss survivor further along than I was. She nodded.
“I used to think, ‘If this happened in your family, you wouldn’t judge. May life give you the opportunity to learn what a foolish and cruel thing you’ve said.’ ” Hearing her say that shocked me a little; I’d never seen her be anything but unfailingly generous and kind.
She continued: “Of course, I wouldn’t wish this on anyone. Anyway, they’re only trying to convince themselves nothing like this could ever happen to them.” We were in the parking lot by then, and she gestured to the box of suicide prevention pamphlets in the front seat of my car. “Ignorance is what we’re out here to combat, right?” she said, shaking her head. “God knows, I didn’t think it could happen to me, either.”
Her comment helped me to realize why the suicide prevention community felt so much like a home. This is a grassroots movement made up of mothers and fathers and partners and daughters and sons. We donate our time because we believe our loved ones did not have to die, and we know firsthand that ignorance can be lethal. This lends a real sense of urgency to the work we do.
In the aftermath of Dylan’s death, I entertained hundreds of fantasies about ways to atone for what Dylan had done. Finally, here it was. I didn’t have to trade my life in a terrorist attack to save a school bus filled with children. I could write a paragraph for a website, populate a spreadsheet, go around a ballroom putting programs on plates, pick a speaker up from the airport. The suicide loss community taught me that showing up in small and simple ways could save lives too.
I read every book and article I could get my hands on. I worked conferences so I could hear the speakers. I struggled through academic papers I found online, even when the summary was the only part I could understand. I watched webinars, pored over educational resources, asked lecturers for their PowerPoint slides so I could make sure I hadn’t missed anything. I asked as many questions as I could.
Eventually, the suicide loss community helped me to see that it was Dylan’s behavior—not mine—that had been pathological. In the process, though, I began to develop an activist’s passion. What had happened with Dylan was an outlier in terms of magnitude and scope and rarity. But it had also been part of a larger problem, one I hadn’t even realized was there.
At any given conference, I meet people who have lost someone close to them. Some of them come from families riddled through the generations with suicide, violent behavior, addiction, or other brain illnesses. Others have no known biological history at all. Many will have lost more than one close family member; others have survived their own attempts, and share their stories so others might learn. Some help the bereaved, while others work every single day to keep their loved ones or their patients alive. All of us are united under the same banner: It may be too late for the ones we have lost, but it may not be too late to save others.
Even as I found solidarity in this community, I stood apart. Coming to understand Dylan’s death as a suicide provided some degree of comfort for me, and I must admit part of me would have liked to stop there. But I was never foolish enough to delude myself that Dylan was the only one who had been lost on the day he took his own life.
Long after I came to accept Dylan’s depression and desire to die by suicide, I was still grappling with the reality of his violence. The person I saw raging on the Basement Tapes had been completely unrecognizable, a stranger in my son’s body. This person—raised in my home, the child I believed I had imbued with my values, whom I had taught to say please and thank you and to have a firm handshake—had killed other people, and planned even greater destruction.
Understanding his death as a suicide was an important first step. But it was only the beginning.
CHAPTER 17
Judgment
I try to find something that gives me a sense of peace and I can’t find one thing. Not writing, drawing, nature. I feel on the edge of disaster all the time. I’m still weeping over Dylan and hating myself for what he did. The image of him on the video is plastered on my brain. I feel as if his entire life and death are unresolved and I haven’t grieved yet or put any of this into perspective. Everything I think about to comfort myself is a double-edged sword.
—Journal entry, August 2003
Four years after Columbine, the date was set for our depositions. Finally, the nameless dread that had hung over us during four years of our grief had crystallized into an item on the calendar.
Our lawyers explained that a deposition was sworn out-of-court testimony that the plaintiffs could use to gather information for a lawsuit if the claims against us progressed to a trial by jury. Tom and I and the Harrises would each spend a day answering questions before a close-knit group of bereaved parents. We would sit, face to face, with the grieving parents of the children Dylan and Eric had murdered. I would see the sorrow in their eyes, and know my son was responsible for putting it there. The thought filled me with terror.
I had already resigned myself to financial disaster. The media had portrayed us as wealthy, in part because my grandfather had been a successful businessman. But he’d left his estate to a charitable foundation, and our home, which looked like a massive compound from the aerial shots that appeared on TV, had been a fixer-upper. So we’d lose our home and have to declare bankruptcy. What was that in comparison to what we’d already been through?
The depositions would be difficult, but once they were done—whatever the outcome—at least they’d be over.
• • •
Dream made me cry all the way to work. Dylan was a baby, about the size of a doll. I was trying to find a way to lay him down, but there was nowhere safe to put him. I was in a dormitory and found a room full of drawers like a morgue or mausoleum. All the women in the room had a place to put their babies. But I had neglected to put a name on a drawer for him, so there was no place to lay him down. He was tired and needed to rest but I had not managed to make a safe place for him to go.
—Journal entry, April 2003
We were already widely blamed, but the depositions would be the decisive appraisal of our competence as parents. Ultimately our fate would rest in the hands of people who hadn’t known our son, and who hadn’t interacted with us as a family. It didn’t take an outside committee to make me feel I had failed Dylan. Each day I cataloged hundreds of things I wished I had done differently.
It seemed highly likely we would be held responsible. On the Basement Tapes, Dylan and Eric were blatantly homicidal and suicidal, whipping weapons around like toys. Tom and I had recognized Dylan’s room in one segment, so the weapons had been in our home at least one night. The intensity of our son’s rage on the tapes made the entire family seem culpable. What could possibly be said to prove his violent tendencies
had been hidden? Although it was the truth, I couldn’t see how anyone would believe it. I barely believed it myself.
I thought often in those days of a young woman I’d met while teaching in a program for at-risk young adults working to get GEDs. Over lunch, she’d told me a story from her childhood. A classmate kept stealing her lunch money. Tired of going hungry, she finally told her father, who threw her into an empty bathtub and beat her with his belt until she could not stand.
“Don’t you ever come to me because you can’t handle your own business,” he told her. She went to school the next day with a rake handle, which she used to beat the girl who had been stealing from her. Nobody ever bothered her again.
“It was the biggest favor he ever did me,” she said, openly amused by my shocked look and the sandwich I’d abandoned.
I had been appalled by the story; it haunted me for years. But as we headed toward the depositions, I thought a lot about what it meant to be a good parent. At the time, I’d judged her father to be abusive, but my student had told the story with love and respect. She believed her dad had parented her appropriately, and indeed he had prepared her for the rough environment in which they lived. Had I missed the point? Certainly I was in no position to judge. Perhaps all of us were doing the best we could with the experience, knowledge, and resources we had.
The only thing I knew for sure was that Dylan had participated in the massacre in spite of the way he had been raised, not because of it. What I didn’t know was how I could possibly convey this to the families of the people he had killed. Even if I could, it would never alleviate the magnitude of their suffering. Nothing would.
• • •
Our original statement of apology had been published in the newspaper, as well as the one we released on the first anniversary of the massacre. But whenever anyone we knew said anything to the press, the quote was taken out of context. We were threatened, and often felt afraid. Unfortunately, our inaccessibility and failure to speak up in our own defense had led people to believe we were hiding secrets.
I’d written those difficult letters to each one of the victims’ families. Then I had withdrawn to spare them the painful intrusion of hearing from me, even though I wanted nothing more in the world than a connection with them. I had spoken the names of their loved ones like a mantra every day, and yet the only points of contact between us came through our lawyers, or from reading about each other in the paper.
I wanted to bridge that distance. I knew from studying other violent incidents that it could significantly reduce trauma if the perpetrator’s family could sit down with victims to apologize in person, to cry and hug and talk. As impossible as it was to envision, acknowledging each other’s humanity seemed like the best course of action; as painful as that interaction would surely be, I craved it.
Eventually, I had to let that go. I was the last person who could ask for a meeting, and couldn’t run the risk of re-traumatizing someone by imposing myself. Each family’s recovery from loss is their own. I can only say here that if speaking with or meeting me would be helpful to any of the family members of Dylan and Eric’s victims, I will always be available to them.
We have had some contact with a few of the victims’ family members over the years, and I believe it was healing, for both parties. The father of a boy who died reached out to us about a year after the tragedy. We invited him to our home in December 2001. I was stunned by his generosity of spirit and found great relief in being able to apologize to him in person for Dylan’s actions, and to express our sorrow for his terrible loss. We wept, shared photos, and talked about our children. When we parted, he said he didn’t hold us responsible. They were the most blessed words I could have hoped to hear him say.
Around the same time, the mother of one of the murdered girls asked to meet. She was forthright and kind, and I liked her immediately. We both shed a lot of tears at that meeting, but I was able to apologize, and to ask questions about her daughter. I was touched she asked about Dylan and wanted to know who he was. A person of deep faith, this mother feels her daughter’s death was predestined, and nothing could have been done to prevent it. I have told her I wish I could agree with her. But I felt a great relief to meet her, and believe she took comfort from it too.
I received a lovely note from the sister of a murdered girl, who wrote that she didn’t think parents were responsible for the actions of their children. We also received a lovely, sad letter from Dave Sanders’s granddaughter. She said she did not hate us or hold us responsible. I treasured both those letters and returned to them time and again for solace.
Four years after the depositions, eight years after the massacre, I would meet another father whose son was murdered at the school. But at the time we were deposed, I had met only two people who had lost children at the school, and thirty-six families were making claims against us. As the day approached, I had no idea what to expect or who would be there when we faced each other in the courtroom.
• • •
Still struggling with fear, anxiety and feelings of craziness. There is no safe place to park my overburdened mind. I feel frightened, beaten, and on the brink of crossing over a line to madness and not coming back. I’m constantly aware of myself thinking about my state of mind, and about death. I was OK until these damn panics started. I was making it OK. Now I’m afraid I’ll never be OK again.
—Journal entry, July 2003
The pressure mounted as the date of the depositions approached. Over dinner one night, Tom and I had a long conversation about the afterlife.
I worried a great deal about Dylan, even after his death. I was terrified his spirit would not be allowed to rest in peace because of his crimes. It was hard enough to know Dylan had suffered in life; I could not bear the idea that he continued to suffer in death, too.
As we were getting into bed, I had a debilitating panic attack.
It was not the first panic attack I had ever experienced. I had been a nervous, fearful child, prone to late-night anxiety, but that night’s attack was the worst I’d ever had. My thoughts spiraled out of control, and I trembled and cried as my mind pitched in terror.
Those panic attacks lasted through the time of the depositions, and beyond. They would strike without warning—at the hardware store, in a meeting at work, while I was driving in the car. Like a tsunami, a sudden, overpowering surge of blinding fear would rise up in front of me, then crash down. These floods of incapacitating terror were worse, by far, than the grief. Sometimes the attacks would run into each other, one after another, and I’d lose hours, even whole afternoons. I drank gallons of chamomile tea, tried every homeopathic remedy for anxiety I could find at the health food store. I was terrified I would not be able to get through my deposition, and tortured myself with imagining what would happen if I had an anxiety attack while on the stand.
Reading my journals from that period is revealing to me now. It is clear, on every single page, that I am hanging on by a thread.
• • •
I am not allowed to talk about what happened during the depositions, except to say it was terribly painful and (I believe) unsatisfying for everyone involved.
I can, however, share a regret. I wanted to apologize to the families in person at the depositions, but our lawyers didn’t agree. “This isn’t the time or place,” I was told. I wish I had fought harder to say those words. I believe their absence was deeply felt by everyone in the room, and continues to be, to this day. Saying I am profoundly sorry is one of the reasons I wanted to write this book.
Neuroscientists like to say behavior is the result of a complex interaction between nature and nurture. At some time in the future, we will likely be able to point to the specific combination of neurotransmitters that lead a person to commit acts of unspeakable violence. I will personally rejoice on the day neurobiologists map the precise mechanism in the brain responsible for empathy and for conscience. Needless to say, we’re not yet there. We do know, from researchers like Dr. Victori
a Arango, that there are clear brain differences between people who die by suicide and people who do not. Dr. Kent Kiehl and others have demonstrated that there also appear to be some clear brain differences between people who commit homicide and people who do not.
I have spent a lot of time wondering whether Dylan had a biological predisposition toward violence—and if so, whether or not we were responsible. I did not consume alcohol while I was pregnant with Dylan. He was not abused in our home, physically, verbally, or emotionally, nor was he subjected to anyone else being abused. He was not raised in poverty, or exposed (to my knowledge) to toxins such as heavy metals, which have been connected to violent behavior. Neither of his parents abused alcohol or drugs. He was well nourished.
Even if Dylan did have a biological predisposition toward violence, biology isn’t destiny. What forces had aggravated this tendency in him? The governor of Colorado cited parenting as a causal factor in his first public appearance after the shootings. But Tom and I knew exactly what had happened in our home all those years we parented Dylan, and we were equally sure the answer wasn’t there.
This was what I wanted to say in the depositions—not because I had any thought of clearing our names, or setting the record straight, but because it was such a crucial opportunity to broaden our understanding of how tragedies like Columbine happen. Dylan did not learn violence in our home. He did not learn disconnection, or rage, or racism. He did not learn a callous indifference to human life. This I knew.
I wanted to say that Dylan had been loved. I loved him while I was holding his pudgy hand on our way to get frozen yogurt after kindergarten; while reading Dr. Seuss’s exuberant There’s a Wocket in My Pocket! to him for the thousandth time; while scrubbing the grass stains out of the knees of his pint-size Little League uniform so he could wear it to pitch the next day. I loved him while we were sharing a bowl of popcorn and watching Flight of the Phoenix together, a month before he died. I still loved him. I hated what he had done, but I still loved my son.
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