The next morning, it felt as if I’d been dropped without warning into someone else’s life.
Just the month before, an old friend had come to town. Catching up over dinner, I’d told her my life had never been more satisfying. I had recently turned fifty. I had a loving husband, and a marriage that had withstood twenty-eight years of ups and downs. Byron was fully supporting himself, and sharing an apartment with a friend. Dylan had recovered from an episode of trouble in his junior year and had done a great job of getting back on track; he was heading into the homestretch before graduation, hanging out with his friends and planning for college. I even had a little free time to draw and paint. The single biggest worry in my life, I told her, was the declining health of our beloved elderly cat, Rocky.
On April 20, 1999, I woke up an ordinary wife and mother, happy to be shepherding my family through the daily business of work, chores, and school. Fast-forward twenty-four hours, and I was the mother of a hate-crazed gunman responsible for the worst school shooting in history. And Dylan, my golden boy, was not only dead, but a mass murderer.
The disconnect was so profound that I could not wrap my head around it. Over the course of that first night in Don and Ruth’s basement guest room, I had come to accept that Dylan was dead, but Tom and I were still in complete denial that he could have taken the lives of others.
More than anything else, this is what stands out about those early days in the aftermath of Columbine: the way we were able to cling, in strange and stubborn ways, to an unreality shielding us from a truth we could not yet bear. But those contortions could not protect us for very long from the wrath of a community we had come to love, or from the emerging truth about our son.
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Don and Ruth were infallibly generous and kind, but they were utterly helpless in the face of our bewilderment and grief, as anyone would have been.
I could barely speak. When I did open my mouth to make a comment, more often than not, I’d trail off mid-thought. The idea of eating was inconceivable: a fork looked like an alien instrument in my hand, and the mere smell of Ruth’s delicious cooking made my stomach churn.
I was exhausted, lower in energy than I’d ever been in my life, moving through the hours as if buried in wet cement. I dimly remember a worried Ruth covering me with an afghan as I lay motionless on her couch. Sleep provided only a temporary reprieve: the second I became conscious, I’d be crushed all over again by the enormity of what Dylan had done, and by the senselessness of it. It’s a cliché, I suppose, to say I was behaving like a zombie, but that is the closest description I have for the way I felt in those early days.
Under normal circumstances—if any circumstances involving the death of a child can ever be called normal—we would have called family members and friends to share the awful news. They would have gathered to grieve with us, and to offer support. We would have been kept busy readying the house for visitors, and friends would have come bearing stories, poems, and photographs to honor Dylan. These coping mechanisms in the face of grief are time-honored and shared across many cultures because they are effective; they give families comfort at a time when very little can. For us, nothing could have been further from normal than our lives during the days following Dylan’s death.
Almost everyone who’d ever known us knew of our son’s connection to the Columbine tragedy within hours of it happening, but they couldn’t get in touch with us because we had fled for our lives. Horrified family members and friends who called our home that afternoon either received no answer or found themselves talking to the law enforcement officials still searching our house.
Clearly, we couldn’t have any of our out-of-state family members or close friends come to Littleton to be with us. Even if we had anywhere for them to stay, we couldn’t guarantee their safety. In hiding at Don and Ruth’s house, we were insulated from how frightening the situation in the community was. We wouldn’t really know how much danger we’d been in until I read about one of Tom’s long-lost cousins in the paper: he was going public to say he’d never met Dylan, and begging people to stop sending him death threats. In the forty-eight-hour period following the shootings, a cluster of family members received more than two thousand phone calls from media and members of the community. Not all were threatening, of course—even in the immediate aftermath, people reached out in support—but it was still unmanageable. A local reporter tried to push his way into my eighty-five-year-old aunt’s home in Ohio. (She was proud she’d stood up to him by asking him to leave, though she insisted he take a fresh-baked cookie with him.)
I couldn’t in good conscience invite the people I loved to a community whose grief was mingled with rage toward our family. In choosing seclusion, we had chosen safety. We had also cut ourselves off from the comfort of others who had loved Dylan.
According to the police report released months later, we were officially notified of Dylan’s death on the day after the massacre. I don’t remember it. Neither does Tom. I do remember learning our son’s body had been moved to the coroner’s for autopsy, news that gave a solid, tangible weight to the fact of Dylan’s death it had not yet had for us. I found the idea of him lying, all alone, on a frigid steel table intolerable. I’d been by his side for every visit to the pediatrician, had held his hand for every vaccination; I’d never missed one of his dental appointments. I longed to go to the coroner’s office to be with him, just so he would not have to be alone.
At the same time, Tom and I held out hope for the autopsy, praying the results would come back positive for drugs. At least drug abuse might give us a way to explain how Dylan could have been involved with this monstrous event.
It felt like death surrounded and threatened to suffocate us. Tom began saying he didn’t think he could go on without Dylan, his buddy. That morbid sentiment was one of the only things that could rouse me out of my near-catatonic state: How would I cope if Tom took his own life, too? After what had happened with Dylan, there was no way I could trust myself to take an accurate read on the emotional state of the other members of my family. For all I knew, Tom and Byron were actively planning their own deaths. The thought made me frantic.
I was having suicidal thoughts, myself. It was the most natural thing in the world to explore a way to silence the grief and guilt and shame I felt. But knowing those feelings were a normal response didn’t make them any less scary.
It was also normal for me to worry excessively about Byron, even if it was unhealthy. As soon as he left my sight, I felt anxious and abandoned. I could not let go of the fear that something horrendous was going to happen to him—or that, out of the depths of his despair over what Dylan had done, he was going to do something terrible to himself. This dynamic between us would intensify over the months to come.
Byron had lived a life touched little by loss: he’d only been to a single funeral in his life, for a Little League coach who’d suffered a sudden heart attack. Tom and I had both survived parents and other relatives, and we knew Byron was unprepared for what the next few days would bring. On the other hand, what preparation could there be? Byron’s first real experience of loss would be a catastrophe of such magnitude and incomprehensibility that all of us would spend the rest of our lives struggling to understand it.