We panicked. Our heads were filled with worst-case scenarios: weapons, drugs, suicide, theft, murder. Had Byron come home for a hidden gun or other contraband? Had he stashed illegal materials in our garage? Should we call the police?
Twenty minutes later, over the sound of our pounding hearts, we heard Byron’s car pull in at a more leisurely speed. He was badly startled to find the two of us, wild-eyed in our pajamas, waiting for him at the top of the stairs. The proverbial hooves we’d heard had been a horse, not a zebra: on his way home, Byron had passed a car that had skidded off the slick road. He’d come home to get a chain from the garage so he could help the other driver out of the ditch.
After that night, I extracted a promise from him that he would never intentionally hurt himself or anyone else. I was surprised to find he needed the same reassurance from me. We were beginning to fall into the complicated pattern that would define our relationship in the years after the shootings, even as we became closer than we’d ever been. I’d encourage him to talk about his feelings, but when he confessed to despair (rational, under the circumstances), I worried he’d harm himself. It was a terribly unfair position to put him in. I was asking him to reassure me he was okay—really, I was asking him to be okay—when of course he was not. It would take us a long time to find a way to talk about our devastation while assuring one another we were still committed to life.
In reality, I am not sure we were. On many days, dying seemed easier than living. All three of us talked about death, ashes, epitaphs, the meaning of life. Tom said he knew what his last words would be: “Thank God it’s over.”
? ? ?
I read mail for five hours, crying nearly the whole time. Two boxes now, one from the post office and one from the lawyer. So many cards and letters of love and support, and yet one hate letter and I am shattered.
—Journal entry, May 1999
Much has been written about the need most people have, in the aftermath of a tragedy like Columbine, to assign blame. Whether it was the scale of the tragedy, or the senselessness, or a thousand other reasons I can think of, Columbine became—and remains—a lightning rod. People blamed video games, movies, music, bullying, access to guns, unarmed teachers, the absence of prayer in schools, secular humanism, psychiatric medication. Mostly, though, they blamed us.
To me, that made sense. If I had been sitting in my living room, shaking out the pages of the freshly delivered Rocky Mountain News with Dylan bagging up the kitchen garbage behind me and Byron happily and untidily ensconced in his apartment across town, I would have blamed us too.
Didn’t I wonder about a criminal’s family whenever I heard about a terrible act of violence? Didn’t I think, What on earth did the parents do to that poor child so he could grow up to do something like that? A child raised with love, in a loving home, could never have done such a thing. For years, and without a second thought, I’d accepted explanations laying the blame squarely with the criminal’s family. Obviously, the parents had been oblivious, irresponsible, secretly abusive. Of course the mother had been a shrew, a smotherer, a doormat.
That was why I was so surprised when people we’d never met began to reach out to our family, in sympathy both for our loss and for our predicament. It is also why I have such esteem and appreciation for the victims’ families who reached out without blame. They cannot know, as I do, what it is to be the mother of a killer, yet they are able to operate from a place of compassion. That is remarkable to me. It is something I am not sure I would have been able to do.
Just days after the shootings, our lawyer handed us a cardboard box containing a hand-painted ceramic angel, a frozen dinner of creamed chicken and biscuits, and a few condolence cards—all gestures of sympathy from people we had never met. That trickle of consideration turned into a stream, and then a flood. People wrote from all over the country, and the world. All they needed was our name and “Littleton, CO” on the envelope, and their words and gifts found their way to us.
A lot of the mail came from people Tom and I had known at various times in our lives: elementary school classmates, teachers, coworkers, and former students. Some were from families in the area whose kids had known Dylan, sharing their memories of him. I read those many times. Lots of the letters were from strangers, though, and a great many of them were anonymous. We received prayers, poems, books, plaques, toys, children’s drawings, and handmade objects. People made charitable donations in Dylan’s memory. They sent cash and checks, which we returned.
People from all walks of life wrote to us: clergymen, attorneys, teachers, social workers, policemen, United States Marines, and prisoners. The generosity was astonishing. People offered legal services, confidential talks, massages, and private cabins where we could hide from the press.
A great many people wrote to tell us they were dismayed to see local memorials held for thirteen and not fifteen victims. They wrote to let me know their own religious organizations or social groups had remembered all fifteen—at concerts where Dylan’s name had been read out with the names of the other victims, or masses where prayers had been said for his soul. I was grateful for those letters. For me, there had been fifteen victims. Although I understood the response in my own community, it was still hard for me to accept that Dylan’s entire life had no value at all because of what he had done before he died.
It had been reported extensively in the media that Dylan and Eric had been bullied, and so we received letters from people of all ages who had been bullied in high school. I did not know Dylan had been bullied, and the shock of needing to readjust my image of him was extreme. Regardless, I was moved by the letter writers’ descriptions of the blind rage, depression, and helplessness that result from feeling so powerless. “I’m not surprised it happened. I’m surprised it didn’t happen at my school, too, and that it doesn’t happen every day at schools across America,” one young man wrote, after sharing his own high school experiences of being afraid to go to the bathroom or walk the halls. Young people wrote directly to Dylan, pouring out their sorrow and hatred for their own school culture, and I wondered if anyone around them knew of the grief they were carrying inside.
Many of the people who wrote shared personal experiences of loss. Some wrote about their own family’s experience with mental illness and suicide. Those letters helped me tremendously, as did the ones where parents and grandparents shared stories about hardship and humiliation caused by a family member.
A minister wrote to share that his son was serving a life sentence for murder. I read that letter often. One of the (many) things I felt guilt about in the wake of the tragedy was my fear that I had failed to impart a proper religious education. I had taught Dylan right from wrong every minute of the day, but we hadn’t regularly attended a church or a synagogue since the boys were small. It was silly—a single example was no kind of sample size—yet I took great comfort from knowing that in this one instance, at least, regular Sunday school hadn’t been enough to stop a child from making a terrible choice.
Our lawyer assigned a member of his staff to go through and remove any hate mail or death threats. Despite his efforts to shield us, we did receive hate mail. And one negative letter obliterated the positive effects of hundreds of supportive ones.
One letter writer demanded in black marker: “HOW COULD YOU NOT KNOW??!”