In early June of 1999, we read in the newspaper that family members of the victims were being invited to visit the school library, where many of their children had died, before renovations gutted the room.
I knew Dylan could never be considered a victim of Columbine, and we understood why we had not been contacted. Yet we needed to see the place where Dylan had taken his own life, and the lives of so many others. Our lawyer spoke to the sheriff’s department and arranged a visit. We had been living more or less in hiding since the shootings, so we met the lawyers in the parking lot of a hardware store in order to switch cars. The cloak-and-dagger routine, for once, did not feel absurd.
The school was still a crime scene. As soon as I saw the yellow tape, my heart thundered in my chest. As we walked through the corridors, we saw construction workers repairing the damage Dylan and Eric had caused. Patches of black soot on the carpets, walls, and ceilings showed where they had tossed small explosives as they walked through the school. Ceiling tiles had been removed, and sections of the carpets. Sheets of clear plastic covered shattered windows. Not for the first or last time, I was dumbfounded by the magnitude of the damage my son had caused. Workers looked down at us from ladders, and I wondered if they knew who we were.
The library door was locked, covered with a sheet of plastic, and swathed in yellow police tape. Before we entered, the sheriff’s department told us we were there to see where our son had died, and that was all. I felt grateful for the professionalism of the police, and for the respect they showed to all the victims.
I was trembling when we entered. Always looking for answers, I wanted to believe that seeing where Dylan and the others had died would provide me with a revelation, some insight. I hoped I would walk into the room and understand something vital about the events of that day, and about Dylan’s state of mind, and I tried to set my sorrow aside so I could receive any truth occupying the space.
The moment I walked into the room, everything fell silent. I could no longer hear the repairs being made in the hallway. I sensed only two things before I was overtaken by tears. I felt the presence of children, and I felt peace.
The police led us to the place where Eric and Dylan had shot themselves. My heart caught when I saw the long, lean, angular shape marked out on the floor. Of course that was Dylan; it looked just like him. My tears splashed the floor. Byron’s gentle hand was on my back as I knelt beside the shape resembling my son and touched the carpet that held him when he fell.
CHAPTER 9
Life with Grief
Quote in the paper about cancer patients. It said “The people who do well create a place in their mind and their spirit where they are well, and they live from that place.” This is what we are doing. Tom’s analogy is that a tornado has destroyed our house, and we can only live in one part of it. This is what living with grief is like. You dwell in that small place where you can function.
—Journal entry, August 1999
The theologian C. S. Lewis begins A Grief Observed, his beautiful meditation on the death of his wife, with these words: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
Years later, those words still hit me with the full weight of the unassailably true. Any loved one’s death, especially the death of a child, shakes you at your very foundation. As Iris Bolton, a suicide loss survivor and author, has written, “I thought I was immortal, that my children and my family were also, that tragedy happened only to others.” We need to believe this in order to survive, and the truth laid bare can be terrifying. For me, the incomprehensibility of the way Dylan died magnified these feelings of instability at the foundation of my identity by throwing everything I believed to be true about the life I’d lived, about my family, and about myself into question.
One of the students I worked with when I was still at the community college shared with me one of the most difficult things about living with her disability.
“Everyone sees the disability first. To them, I’m an amputee before I’m a person,” she told me.
At the time, I was grateful to her for the insight because I knew it would help me in my work. After Columbine, though, I knew exactly what she meant. I was certain I would always be seen as the woman who raised a murderer, and that no one—including me—would ever see me as anything else.
? ? ?
Though I was fifty years old, in the months after Columbine I felt keenly the loss of my own parents. I was grateful they hadn’t lived to see what my life had become but longed, childlike, for the simple reassurance of their presence.
My father died when I was eighteen, but I was thirty-eight when I lost my mother, and I relied on her long after I became an adult. At her funeral, my siblings and I referred to her as the North Star, a tribute to her unerring gift for helping us to find our bearings in life even in the most turbulent of circumstances. I suspect that is why, in the months and years after Columbine, I dreamed about her almost as often as I dreamed about Dylan.
In one dream I had soon after the tragedy, it was night and a cold wind was blowing. I was searching for my car in an enormous parking lot while clutching Dylan, about two years old, in my arms. I tried to wrap a blanket around him to keep him warm as I walked up and down the rows looking for the car in increasing desperation, but huge, heavy shopping bags filled with papers hung from my arms. These made it so difficult to carry Dylan that I worried I would drop him onto the pavement.
Just as he was beginning to slip from my grasp, my mother stepped forward. She said, “Give me the bags. You take care of your son.” One by one, she lifted the heavy handles cutting into my wrists and arms, allowing me to hold Dylan tightly, and wrap the blanket securely around him. I found our car and placed Dylan safely in his car seat while my mother stood by, holding the bags she’d taken from me. Then I woke up.
The dream revealed the path I needed to follow. The papers in the bags represented everything pulling me away from my grief: worry about the lawsuits, money concerns, fear of seeing my name in the newspapers, the thousands of letters and bills and notices and legal documents taking over our den in enormous drifts of fear and obligation. It was easy for me to get overwhelmed by the constant media assault, the world’s hatred and blame, not to mention my constant anxiety that something terrible would happen to Byron. Our financial situation emerged as completely disastrous, and so complicated that it seemed we would never dig ourselves out of the hole.
But my mother was right. I had to focus on grieving for Dylan and his victims, and let go of everything else.
That was difficult. Even if I hadn’t been incapacitated by grief, the sheer administrative weight of what we were dealing with would have overwhelmed me. A month after the tragedy, Tom and I were still wandering the rooms of our empty house like ghosts, dazed by loss and remorse, haunted by the same circular thoughts. I miss Dylan. How could he do such a horrible thing? I can’t believe I’ll never see him again. How could someone I loved so much murder people in cold blood? Other children? If only I’d known, said the magic words, done whatever it took to stop him. How could he have done such a thing?