And then, always, always, the impossibility and permanence of the loss: How can it be possible I will never again feel his scratchy cheek against mine?
Periodically, we’d be jolted back into a kind of frenetic energy—if not by a renewed realization of what Dylan had done, then by the myriad ways the ramifications of his actions would destroy the home and the life and the family we’d spent twenty-seven years building. Though Gary Lozow significantly discounted his legal services, the first bill we received shocked us into reality. We had absolutely no idea how we would pay it. In that instance, my mother stepped forward from the grave to help us. Before she died in 1987, when the boys were small, she bought life insurance policies for both of them. Dylan’s two policies were paid out to us after his death, and they exactly covered the amount of that first bill.
It was only a drop in the bucket, though, and there would be years of legal bills ahead. Tom tried to find consulting work in the oil field, but there were few opportunities, and those that did come up disappeared quickly when potential investors learned he was the father of one of the shooters in the Columbine tragedy.
Our insurance company took some time to decide whether they would cover our legal expenses at all. When they finally agreed to, we learned they wouldn’t cover our working with Gary. This was devastating, as he’d come to feel more like a trusted friend than an attorney—an oasis of sanity in the madness. Starting over with outsiders was emotionally difficult, but our new attorneys, Frank Patterson and Gregg Kay, were compassionate and patient with us as we showed them family photos and talked about our lives with Dylan. I needed to feel they knew us as a family, that they knew Dylan. Before long, we grew comfortable with them.
Even with their help, each day brought a mountain of incomprehensible paperwork and decisions made more distressing because we couldn’t fully understand their implications. Everybody was suing somebody else. There were lawsuits against Dylan’s friend Robyn, who’d bought three of the four guns; and Mark Manes, who’d sold them the other one. There were lawsuits against the companies that manufactured the guns, and against the company that made Eric’s antidepressant medication. There were lawsuits against the sheriff’s department, the county, and the police. Thirty-six lawsuits would ultimately be filed against us. Our lawyers were meticulous, and did their best to explain what was going on, but the complexity of our legal situation was far beyond my ability to grasp it.
To be honest, although the lawyers were exercised about it, my own feeling was: Who cares? To the extent that the lawsuits would provide a parent with the money to take care of a grievously wounded child, I was glad for them. But the lawsuits wouldn’t give parents their children back. They wouldn’t return Dave Sanders, the teacher who had been shot, to his family. Lawsuits wouldn’t give us the opportunity to do a thousand things differently, or provide us with an explanation of how the unthinkable had happened. And they wouldn’t bring Dylan back.
? ? ?
Yesterday was terrible. After it took me 4? hours to get up, the rest of the day wasn’t much better. I cried and cried and just couldn’t get it together. I talked to S. in the afternoon and told her I couldn’t go back to work, after I’d just told her I could.
—Journal entry, May 1999
A month after Columbine, I was on the phone with Susie, my supervisor from work. She’d been terrific about checking in with me on a regular basis, occasionally delivering a meal, or a plant tied with good wishes from my coworkers. (Years of accumulated sick leave and unused personal days within the state community college system were the only reason I still had a job at all.)
I was crying, as usual. Susie listened for a while, and then she said: “I think you should come back to work.”
The idea startled me into silence. Returning to work would be impossible, preposterous. How in the world could I think about anything else but Dylan and the disaster he created? How could I leave the safety of my home, and face people who never knew Dylan the way I’d known him, the way I’d loved him?
“I can’t do it,” I said.
Gently, she persisted. Yes, we’d have to work out the details, but it would be good for me, and my colleagues could use my help. “What if I gathered a project you could do from home? Something with no deadline you could work on at your own speed?” I didn’t have the energy to protest. It was easier to agree than to push back.
The innocuous package Susie sent later that week sat untouched for days. Once I began, I could maybe get an hour’s worth of work done in a day—and on many days I couldn’t even do that. Returning to work for real seemed utterly hopeless.
But I needed to reconnect to a part of my identity that had nothing to do with being Dylan’s mother, and tackling a project that could be completed also appealed. Our personal lives felt monumental, unscalable. Nothing would ever be resolved, understood, or finished. A work project, even in my severely compromised condition, could be done, and done well. So I kept at the little project, even on days when it took me an hour to write a coherent sentence. Eventually I realized I couldn’t do it properly without collaborating with the members of my team. As my supervisor had hoped, the small project hooked me back into life, and I began to make plans to return to work, part-time.
I did so with trepidation. This was a relatively new job for me, and while I enjoyed cordial relationships with my new coworkers, I didn’t know any of them well. I worried that they didn’t have an image of my son to counter the image of him blaring from every news channel. As for me—well, I was the mother of a murderer.
I couldn’t stand thinking that the very fact of my presence would re-traumatize my colleagues. The community had suffered dreadfully, and tendrils reached into my workplace. The children and family members of some of my colleagues had been in the school and narrowly escaped with their lives. One coworker’s husband, a teacher at the school, had almost been shot. His close friend Dave Sanders died that day. An administrator’s daughter was in intensive therapy with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Each day brought a new headline about the investigation, the lawsuits, or the many conflicts brewing over access to information. Even if a coworker hadn’t known anyone in the school, how could they be expected to know what to say when we bumped into each other getting coffee in the break room? How could they know how to work with me?
Fortunately, the community college system I worked for had an outstanding leader at the helm, a president who understood the complexity of the situation. She wanted to help me to be comfortable, while simultaneously ensuring my presence would not be unduly troubling for anyone else. A week before I returned, she sent a memo to all system office staff. Anyone concerned about working with me, she wrote, should come to her. A policy was already in place to help employees deal with the torrent of media inquiries, and a counselor would be made available to anyone who needed support. While it was difficult to be the subject of such a memo, I greatly appreciated the wisdom of it.
I met with a staffer in the human resources department to make arrangements for my privacy and safety. I was amazed that she spoke about the accommodations as if my experience had been an ordinary setback, like a chronic illness or a parent with Alzheimer’s. We asked the receptionist to screen my calls, and to erase my schedule from the whiteboard. An administrator offered me her office so I could make personal calls behind a closed door. I slid my nameplate out from its bracket on my cubicle wall and tucked it away in my desk drawer.