During those trying years, Dylan kept doing what he was supposed to be doing. He seemed to enjoy the role of the cooperative, responsible child, the kid who did the right thing, and Tom and I needed him to fulfill that role more than ever when we were preoccupied with Byron’s welfare. Dylan’s commitment to self-reliance obscured how much he needed help at the end of his life. It unquestionably contributed to our inability to see him as troubled.
In the summer after eighth grade, Dylan began to develop the lean, angular look he’d have for the rest of his life. We wanted to reward his transition into high school, so we offered to send him to a summer camp in the mountains. The camp was rustic, and the kids shouldered the majority of what needed to be done to keep the place running. Dylan never hesitated to complain at home when he felt he’d been assigned more than his fair share of chores, but he had no complaints about camp. He loved being outdoors, and the counselors told us he got along well with the other kids.
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Both of our sons played baseball from the time they were small; the sport was the common thread woven through their childhoods and adolescence. They watched games on television, fought over the sports pages, and took turns going to baseball games with their father. Tom loved the game, and the three of them would spend summer nights playing catch in the backyard, or throwing balls through a plywood sheet Tom had customized for pitching practice. Dylan’s walls were covered with posters of his baseball heroes: Lou Gehrig, Roger Clemens, Randy Johnson. One of our favorite movies was The Natural, which starred Robert Redford as a baseball prodigy. The boys watched it so often that they knew parts by heart.
Baseball was not only a wholesome pastime for the boys; it was a shared love between Tom’s family and my own. One of my grandfathers had been asked to join a professional team as a young man (he declined: he didn’t want to leave his widowed mother), and both Tom’s father and his brother played amateur ball well into their adult years. I loved that our boys played this classic American sport, just as their grandfathers and great-grandfathers had before them. Both Dylan and Tom were devastated when Dylan, entering Columbine High School as a ninth grader, didn’t make the Columbine High School baseball team.
Byron’s smooth right-handed pitch kept him in the game until he grew tired of it. Dylan also pitched, but he was a lefty and fired the ball like a cannon, trying to strike the batter out. Throwing hard was his trademark, and he often sacrificed accuracy for speed. In time, his pitching style took its toll on his arm. The summer before Dylan went into eighth grade, Tom hired a coach to help both boys with their form. During one of their sessions, Dylan seemed to be struggling. Suddenly, he stopped throwing altogether, his eyes downcast. Tom hurried over, worried he or the coach had pushed Dylan too hard. He saw Dylan’s eyes were filled with tears.
“My arm hurts too much to pitch,” Dylan told his dad.
Tom was shocked. Dylan had never mentioned any pain before, though we later learned it had been going on for months, worsening with each throw. It was typical of Dylan not to mention it: he’d been determined to overcome the problem by force of will. Tom took him to the doctor immediately. Dylan had a painful inflammation around the tendons of the elbow, and the doctor recommended he take a break from baseball. He stayed away until the following summer, when he began to practice for the Columbine High School baseball team tryouts.
Tom had also begun to experience serious joint pain. (Right around the time Dylan was entering high school, Tom was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, and would undergo surgeries on his knees and shoulders in the next few years.) His ability to help Dylan practice was limited as he could no longer throw a ball, so he hired the pitching coach to come back. As it turned out, Dylan’s arm was still sore. The day of the tryouts, the two of them made quite a pair—Dylan favoring his elbow, and Tom’s knees hurting so badly he could barely walk out to the field.
Given his injury, we greeted the news that Dylan hadn’t made the team with mixed emotions. Although disappointed he wouldn’t be participating in a sport in high school, neither Tom nor I wanted to push him into an activity that might cause him lasting physical damage. As a family, we tried to minimize the loss and move on. For his part, Dylan claimed he hadn’t liked some of the kids on the team anyway.
His passion for the sport didn’t come to an end. He still followed professional baseball religiously, and went occasionally to games with his dad; in time, he’d join a fantasy baseball league. Not making the team was a much greater loss than we knew, though, as the focus of his attention shifted from baseball to computers.
Dylan and Byron weren’t eligible for bus service to Columbine High School, so Tom or I had to drop them off and pick them up. When Dylan began ninth grade, we worked out a plan that honored his growing sense of independence: after school, he would take the city bus a couple of miles to the college where I worked, and stay with me until it was time to go home. I loved having Dylan at my office with me while I worked. I kept a file drawer full of snacks for him, which often went unopened because the women in my department spoiled him with homemade treats. If his homework was done, he’d head to the student lounge to watch television, or to the cafeteria for a milkshake. Occasionally he’d stretch his long legs out under a table in my office to take a nap.
When he was a sophomore, he volunteered at the day care on campus. The director was a colleague of mine, and I’d occasionally stop by to watch him work. True to form, Dylan would be out there on the playground, making sure the little kids were lining up neatly to get a turn on the swing.
Every mother worries about the social aspects of high school, but I was less worried than most. Dylan was tall and geeky, and never part of that top rung of the social hierarchy reserved for athletes, but his social life flourished in high school. He had three close friends with whom he spent most of his free time. On any given weekend, one of them was at our house, or Dylan was at one of theirs. The four of them—Dylan, Zack, Nate, and Eric—had other friends too, but these were the kids we considered Dylan’s inner circle.
Dylan met Nate, the boy I always considered his closest friend, in junior high school. Nate was an only child, raised by his mother and stepfather. Like Dylan, Nate was gangly: tall and thin, with long dark lashes and black hair. Unlike Dylan, though, he was effusive and happy to talk a mile a minute about everything under the sun. In the early years of their friendship, the two of them spent most of their free time outdoors, playing catch and other games. Nate handily outplayed Dylan in basketball, but Dylan beat him soundly when they played pool back at our house. When Nate spent the night, the boys would stay up late playing pool or video games, or trying out recipes from late-night cooking shows. (Dylan was famous, even among the voracious adolescents he hung out with, for his appetite. He was adventurous, too. When his friends came out with us for dinner, they’d usually stick with the fried standards, while Dylan experimented with calamari or barbecued duck.)
Nate spent a lot of time at our house. He was the first one on his feet to help if I came in carrying groceries or laundry, and quick to compliment my cooking. I’m happiest when I have a full house, and never complained when a group of teenagers descended upon my kitchen like locusts, although our house was sufficiently remote that it didn’t happen very often.