There were hints that Dylan was troubled, and I take responsibility for missing them, but there was no deafening klaxon, no blinking neon danger sign. You wouldn’t nervously herd your child away from Dylan if you saw him sitting on a park bench. In fact, after a few minutes of chatting with him, you’d be more likely to invite him home for Sunday dinner. As far as I’m concerned, it is precisely this truth that makes us so vulnerable.
In the aftermath of Columbine, the world’s judgment was understandably swift: Dylan was a monster. But that conclusion was also misleading, because it tied up too neatly a far more confounding reality. Like all mythologies, this belief that Dylan was a monster served a deeper purpose: people needed to believe they would recognize evil in their midst. Monsters are unmistakable; you would know a monster if you saw one, wouldn’t you? If Dylan was a fiend whose heedless parents had permitted their disturbed, raging teen to amass a weapons cache right under their noses, then the tragedy—horrible as it was—had no relevance to ordinary moms and dads in their own living rooms, their own children tucked snugly into soft beds upstairs. The events might be heartbreaking, but they were also remote. If Dylan was a monster, then the events at Columbine—however tragic—were anomalous, the equivalent of a lightning strike on a clear, sunny day.
The problem? It wasn’t true. As monstrous as Dylan’s actions were, the truth about him is much harder to square. He wasn’t the pinwheel-eyed portrait of evil we know from cartoons. The disquieting reality is that behind this heinous atrocity was an easygoing, shy, likable young man who came from a “good home.” Tom and I were hands-on parents who limited the intake of television and sugary cereals. We monitored what movies our boys could see, and put them to bed with stories and prayers and hugs. With the exception of some troubling behavior the year before the tragedy (hardly out of the ordinary for a teenage boy, we were told), Dylan was the classic good kid. He was easy to raise, a pleasure to be with, a child who had always made us proud.
If the portrayal of Dylan as a monster left the impression that the tragedy at Columbine had no relevance to average people or their families, then whatever measure of comfort it offered was false. I hope the truth will awaken people to a greater sense of vulnerability—more frightening, perhaps, but crucial—that cannot be so easily circumscribed.
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I’d wanted to be a mother since I was a child myself. Tom had lost both of his parents when he was a child, and despite the loving care he received from the family members who raised him, he felt the loss of his mother and father acutely. This strengthened his own resolve to be an active, involved, and present parent. My own 1950s childhood looked like the traditional postwar life depicted in the television shows of the day. Although the world had changed significantly (and I worked four days a week, instead of staying home full-time, as my mother had with her three kids), that close-knit, suburban family model was the one Tom and I followed in raising our own children.
We were confident parents, especially by the time we had our second child. Anxious by nature, I never stopped fussing over choking hazards and good manners. But I’d been babysitting since childhood, and I’d spent the majority of my career teaching both children and adults. My graduate degree had required me to take courses in child development and psychology. Naively, I believed the combination of knowledge and intuition honed by experience was sufficient to stand my own children in good stead. At the very least, I reasoned, we’d know where to turn if we encountered problems.
Our confidence as parents was supported by what we saw in our children. As a small child, Byron, our first, was a joyful whirling dervish. He reminded me of Lucille Ball’s character in I Love Lucy, always getting up to (or into) something. Byron was the kid who whizzed out of the restaurant bathroom, straight into the waitress with the loaded tray. He was the kid who hooked a plate of potato salad so it crashed into his own face, pie-fight style, while demonstrating an armpit fart—and then did it again with a bowl of oatmeal the next morning during a breakfast reenactment. It was pure boyish tomfoolery without an ounce of malice in it. Even Tom was usually laughing too hard at Byron’s antics to get mad.
After Byron’s energy, Dylan’s willingness to sit on the floor and play quietly was a revelation. Both boys were active and playful, but Dylan sought out sedentary tasks that required patience and logic, and after his always-on-the-go brother had outgrown snuggling, Dylan would still slow down for a book or a puzzle or a cuddle with me. Our younger son was observant, curious, and thoughtful, with a gentle personality. Curious about what was going on around him, patient, even-tempered, and quick to giggle, Dylan could make the most routine errand fun. He was up for anything—a social, affable child, who loved to do stuff.
And he was smart. Dylan’s giftedness emerged early. Shortly after he learned to hold objects by himself as a baby, Dylan went through a brief spell of crying at night. We tried everything we could think of to comfort him, and then took him to the pediatrician to see if the problem might be a physical one. The doctor checked him over carefully, and then advised us to put Dylan to bed with safe toys and soft books so he could entertain himself if he woke up. That night, we heard Dylan wake and make quiet sounds as he played with the toys and looked at the books. When he was finished, he went back to sleep. He’d just been bored.
As a teacher, I marveled at his precociousness. Maybe it shouldn’t have mattered so much to me, but he learned so quickly! In third grade he fell in love with origami, an interest that lasted until his adolescence. (A short while after he made his first paper crane, we hosted two Japanese exchange students in our home. Dylan was disappointed to discover the girls didn’t know much more about paper-folding than I did.) Over the years we collected a lot of origami books, and Dylan mastered the most complicated designs, ones with seventy or eighty folds. He moved fast, and his pudgy fingers couldn’t always get the creases razor-sharp, but these were nonetheless little works of art. I still see his handiwork in the homes of our friends, and when his fifth-grade teacher paid us a condolence call after the tragedy, she brought one of her most treasured possessions to show us: an origami tree, decked with tiny origami ornaments—a Christmas gift it had taken Dylan hours to make.
As a toddler, he was fascinated by snap-together construction toys; as he grew older, he spent countless hours building with Legos. Precise and methodical, he loved to follow the printed instructions exactly, meticulously building ships, castles, and space stations, only to dismantle and build them again. Dylan had a bunk bed in his bedroom, and Tom placed a large sheet of plywood over the lower bed so Dylan would have an out-of-the-way spot to work on larger and more complicated structures over a period of days. Byron preferred freestyle construction, and his imagination was the source of some wildly creative projects. Dylan was the opposite. Occasionally concerned he was too focused on perfection, Tom and I would talk to him about how it was okay to substitute an alternate piece if he couldn’t find the exact right one.