I hoped for kindness, and for the most part I got it, more than I felt I deserved. But not everyone was kind and understanding, and that was okay too. The denial I had been living in—especially the belief that Dylan had been coerced into participating, or that he hadn’t directly committed any of the violence—was a natural response, but it was no longer appropriate. Being back in the world meant confronting the enormity of what Dylan had done.
I sensed judgment and anger and pain from some of the people I worked with. Friends told me when someone spoke unkindly behind my back. Some people avoided me, or confronted me indirectly. One of these incidents stands out in my mind, not because it was the worst confrontation, or the most devastating comment anyone made, but because it articulated exactly what I feared everyone was thinking, not to mention my own worst fears about myself.
I went along on a monitoring visit of a vocational program our office had funded in a small rural high school outside Denver. Being in a high school was difficult for me, and I fought tears the entire visit, especially when we stepped into a large computer lab where a group of happy, productive kids were working.
We introduced ourselves to the computer teacher, a young man not much older than his students, and congratulated him on the thriving program. When I said my name, he stared into my face with intensity. When one of our team members complimented his ability to keep so many machines in good working order, he said, “Well, you get to know the machines. After a while, it’s like being a good parent.” At that, he turned away from the person who’d asked the question so he could make searing eye contact with me. “When you’re a good parent, you just sort of know what your kids are up to.”
Those experiences hurt, and I hated them. But as much as I wanted to flee whenever the topic of Columbine surfaced, I could not spend my life walking out of meetings to avoid comments I did not want to hear, or not going to them at all so I’d never encounter a situation that might cause me distress. Despite the horrendous maelstrom of emotions I was living with, I wasn’t the only one hurting. I had to face the magnitude of Dylan’s actions, and accept how his terrible, violent choices had affected others. Each time I recovered from an uncomfortable encounter, I took another step toward accepting the totality of what Dylan had done. Whether people supported or judged me, being back to work put me shoulder to shoulder with the community my son tried to destroy.
I’d always been conscious of the opinions of others; suddenly, their approval was paramount. I felt sure my own behavior was being evaluated and judged and used to explain how Dylan could have killed and maimed. Always mildly obsessive about my work, I entered a period of intense perfectionism. I would make no errors, commit no miscommunication. I would catch every typo; do every project better than I needed to do it and with time to spare. It wasn’t enough to be competent, or normal; I had to convince others I had not caused the craziness exhibited by my son. If I did make a small mistake, I’d often become too upset to continue working. Whenever someone asked me a question, I felt criticized. Driving, I worried I’d accidentally injure or kill someone in my distraction, cementing the world’s conviction that I didn’t deserve to draw breath.
I looked at photographs of other people’s happy families on their desks and wondered: What did they do, that I didn’t? At the same time, I felt defensive and desperate to show people Dylan had been loved, that I’d been a good mother—and that, despite our closeness, I’d had no idea what he was planning or the slightest suspicion he was capable of such a barbaric act.
Of course, I was assigning to others all the negative feelings I had about myself. I had raised a murderer without knowing it, a person with such a faulty moral compass that he’d committed an atrocity. I was a fool, a sucker, a dolt. I hadn’t even been one of those cool parents who smokes pot with their kids or introduces them to their groovy boyfriends. No, I’d been an “everybody sits down for family dinner” kind of a parent, an “I want to meet your friends and their parents before you spend the night at their house” kind of a parent. What good had it done?
I remembered driving a kindergarten-aged Dylan back to the grocery so he could return a piece of penny candy he’d taken without paying for it, and how grateful I’d been when the manager soberly accepted Dylan’s apology and took the candy from his small hand instead of rewarding his theft by allowing him to keep it. I thought of all the times I’d called the mom hosting a sleepover to find out what movie she was planning to show. More than once, I’d asked for a less violent selection. Why had I bothered trying to establish a contextual framework for violence, when the whole world could see how miserably I failed to protect my son and so many others from it?
For twenty years, signing permission slips and designing elaborate Easter egg hunts and making sure my boys had sneakers that fit had been the touchstones of my life, around which I had fit my work and my art and my marriage. Now I had to ask: What had the point of any of it been?
It’s probably impossible to raise a child without having regrets. After murder-suicide, the guilt and second-guessing are constant, intolerable companions. When I went home from work at night, I paged obsessively through our family photo albums. There were the trips to the dairy farm, the natural history museum, the park—the ordinary stuff of a happy middle-class childhood. I was relieved to see how often in the photos Dylan was hugged, tickled, cuddled, or otherwise touched with love. I daydreamed about buttonholing strangers on the street and showing them the albums. There, I wanted to say. See? I’m not crazy. Look at how happy we were!
But the sight of Dylan’s arm, casually slung around Tom’s neck while he grinned and called out to me behind the camera, would once again tap in to that seemingly endless river of sorrow.
In the old movie Gaslight, the Charles Boyer character is trying to drive his wife, who is played by Ingrid Bergman, insane. He moves artwork and jewelry, and plants items he claims she’s “stolen” in her purse. It works: when his wife can no longer trust her own perceptions of reality, she begins to break down. I thought of Gaslight often in those days, as I tried to reconstruct an identity for myself. I had thought I’d been a good mother. I had loved and been proud of my son. Nothing I saw when Dylan was alive made me think he was suffering from problems of any real magnitude. Nor, looking back, could I see any obvious, screaming signs. The cognitive dissonance was intense.
When you’re a good parent, you just sort of know what your kids are up to. The teacher’s comment stung me more than hateful invective would have—not because I didn’t believe it, but because I did.
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Tom mostly wonders if we will ever be reunited with him. This is on Tom’s mind constantly. He says he’d feel comforted if he knew he’d see him again. I think a lot about where Dylan is and whether his evil actions prevent him from resting in peace, in God’s care. I hope there is a forgiving God who will recognize that he was a child.
—Journal entry, May 1999
My friend Sharon lost a child to suicide, and she urged me to find a suicide loss survivors’ support group.
I was desperate to be among people who would listen and sympathize and not judge, but I could not imagine walking into a room filled with strangers and talking about what Dylan and Eric had done. More to the point, as Gary Lozow had pointed out, if our lawsuits went to trial, another support group participant might have to serve as a witness. I felt I had caused enough damage already.