I had been deliberately avoiding news coverage, but in order to write to the families, I needed to know more about their loved ones. So I forced myself to read newspaper articles for information about the teacher and each of the children who had been killed. I never, ever wanted to dehumanize the individuals who had been killed or injured by thinking of them as a collective group—the “victims.” In each case, I needed to know the particular, specific treasure that had been lost.
Sorrow piled on sorrow with every biographical detail I read. Learning what each person had been interested in and what their friends and loved ones said about them broke my heart. The waste of it, the idea that Dylan had robbed innocent people of their precious lives, and of the futures they should have had, was intolerable. How could he have inflicted such pain? How could anyone, raised in our home, have done this?
At times, writing the letters felt like standing dangerously close to a fire, and sometimes I had to step back. Each day, I wanted to run as fast as I could from the task in front of me. But if I did, I knew I would lose my connection to what had happened. Columbine had already become the lightning rod it still is, a symbol in a single word for the hazards of bullying, mental illness, irresponsible parenting, guns. Like everyone else, I believed there were answers to be pursued, but I was not yet ready to take refuge in abstractions. Columbine wasn’t “about” guns or bullying; it was about the fifteen people who were now dead, and the twenty-four who had been injured, some profoundly.
Yet even while I was trying to write coherent letters acknowledging my son’s responsibility, I was clinging ferociously to my denial that Dylan could have been responsible for killing anyone. As I wrote them, I believed with all my heart that the people who sustained mortal wounds had been shot by Eric, not by Dylan. In the letters, I referred to the “role” Dylan played in the tragedy because I still didn’t know what had really happened that day, only that people had been killed and wounded. I referred to a “moment of madness,” because I believed Dylan had to have acted on impulse; it was inconceivable his participation could have been planned ahead of time. I could not yet believe my son was a murderer, because I did not accept that his intent had been to kill.
I feared that many of the families would be insulted by my presumption in reaching out. They would say—correctly—that I did not have the right even to utter their loved one’s name. When I read the first drafts of the letters I had written, I almost threw them away. The words on the paper were shamefully, pitifully inadequate.
But writing them was all that I could think of to do. I could not undo what Dylan and Eric had done. I could not bring back the lives that had been lost, nor heal those who had been wounded physically or psychologically. I was powerless to dampen the aftershocks of the tragedy for myself or anyone else, and I understood I could not control how people would respond. I was not asking for forgiveness, or for understanding, or for anything, except the chance to say that I was sorry.
? ? ?
Read today that Mr. Rohrbough had destroyed Dylan and Eric’s crosses. I don’t blame him at all. No one should expect the grieving families of victims to embrace Dylan and Eric now. I’d feel the same way.
—Journal entry, May 1999
A week after the shootings, my brother, Phil, came to spend a few days with us. My sister couldn’t join him: one of her teenage children, Dylan’s cousin, had been so traumatized by the news of Dylan’s role that she needed medical attention.
Phil had come to comfort us, but what could he say or do? We were shadow people, ghosts of ourselves, moving through a never-ending twilight characterized by discombobulation, shame, and sorrow. Our days were consumed with legal appointments and the paranoid measures we followed in order to avoid the media and those who might want to harm us.
Dylan’s face was everywhere: Murderer. Terrorist. Neo-Nazi. Outcast. Scum.
Soon after the shootings, we received yet another terrible shock. It was reported that Robyn, Dylan’s prom date, had bought three guns for the boys.
My first thought was, Oh, no. Poor Robyn. In a flash, I could see it: she had done it because they’d asked her to, because she liked them, because she was a nice person. She would never, ever, ever have done it if she’d believed it was unsafe. She’s going to have to live with this for the rest of her life, I thought. Then, for the thousandth time: Look how many people they’ve hurt.
The aftershocks kept coming. Still mostly insulated from news and the outside world, I was only dimly aware of most of them. I didn’t know until a year later that Marilyn Manson had canceled concert dates in our area out of respect, or that the NRA did not cancel their annual meeting, held at a hotel fifteen miles away from the school, just ten days after the shootings.
I did learn that school authorities and police had been told about Eric’s website, the one Judy Brown had told me about on the terrible day of the shootings, and that he’d talked openly on the site about pipe bombs and killing people.
And I saw Dylan on the cover of Time magazine, next to the headline “The Monsters Next Door.” Despite the monstrous nature of what he had done, it hurt me terribly to see that word used to describe him and utterly surreal to see his face under the iconic logo. It was still hard to believe Dylan had done something horrendous enough that the neighbors would know about it, let alone the entire world.
I read the article. The next day, I wrote:
Depression really kicked in when I read the Time Magazine article yesterday. They made Dylan sound human, like a nice kid gone astray. This hurts more than the villain portrayal because it shows how totally senseless it all was. He didn’t have to do any of this. He was so close to a life away from high school. If he was depressed, he didn’t show us.
A makeshift memorial had been erected in town, consisting of fifteen rough-hewn wooden crosses, one for each person who had died, including Dylan and Eric. Immediately, Dylan’s and Eric’s crosses were chopped down and thrown in a dumpster. A church group planted fifteen commemorative trees in a circle on their property, and police and congregation members stood helplessly by while two were felled.
Of course, I understood why people did not want Dylan and Eric to be mourned or memorialized, but this unchallenged display of anger frightened us. Within a few days of his arrival, my brother accepted an offer to sleep at a neighbor’s house. He urged us to leave with him. “You’re in such a state of shock, you can’t see how dangerous this is.”
We were in shock, but the bigger issue was that we just didn’t care. One particularly bad night, Tom said wearily, “I wish he’d killed us, too.” It was a thought we would have on many occasions over the years.
A reporter got ahold of our phone records and called everyone we’d communicated with over the previous months. Our friends and family members were already inundated, but now the press started showing up at the two apartment buildings we owned to question our tenants. We’d worked hard to build a family business, and the safety and comfort of our tenants was a priority, but they were being harassed simply because they’d had the misfortune of moving into one of our properties. We didn’t see a way to protect them, so we moved forward to sell the buildings.