It was truer than he knew. Because of the legal restrictions, I’d never joined a support group. And while my friends and colleagues had been wonderful in allowing me to share my memories of Dylan and my grief and my questions, how on earth could I talk about what I’d seen on those tapes? The lawsuits made it impossible, first of all. And now that some of my questions had been answered, my shame and anger eclipsed everything else.
Desperate, I made an appointment with the therapist I’d seen in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. I’d always suspected he didn’t have the right training to handle the complications of my situation, and that appointment was the final straw. After I’d told him what we’d seen and heard on the tapes, he could only sit in stunned silence. Finally, he confessed he was in over his head, and didn’t know how to help. He asked if I would be willing to allow him to consult with another counselor. Though I was grateful to him for his honesty and his help, we agreed to part ways.
I asked for recommendations from my doctor, from friends, and from a pastor and a rabbi. Gary Lozow helped me to vet the candidates. It was a dispiriting process. One therapist couldn’t wait to get off the phone when she heard who I was. She didn’t want to become entangled in the many lawsuits swirling around our family. Some displayed a prurient interest in the details of the case, while others confessed they simply weren’t up to the task. We kept at the search, and I found someone who had also lost a child, which made a world of difference. When I looked into her eyes, I felt I’d come home.
In truth, I was only blindingly angry with Dylan for a few days after seeing the tapes. I had to let it go. Anger blocks the feeling of love, and the love kept winning.
? ? ?
It was my new therapist who helped me to see why that day at the sheriff’s office had devastated me so entirely. I’d had to start the grieving process all over again. The Dylan I had already mourned was gone, replaced by someone I didn’t even recognize.
Like Dorian Gray’s portrait, the picture I had of Dylan in my mind grew uglier every time I looked at it. The buffer I’d clung to all those months—believing he’d been an unwitting or coerced participant, or acting in a moment of madness—was gone. The evil face I’d seen on the tapes was a side of him I did not recognize, a side I’d never seen during his life. After seeing the tapes, it was really hard not to say, That devil—that is who he was.
With my therapist’s help, I would find there was no lasting comfort in casting Dylan as a monster. Deep down, I couldn’t reconcile that characterization with the Dylan I had known. The rest of the world could explain away what he had done: either he was born evil—a bad seed—or he’d been raised without moral guidance. I knew it wasn’t nearly so simple.
After we saw the Basement Tapes, I opened a small box in my desk drawer where I keep a few treasured keepsakes. Among them was a tiny origami horse. I checked and rechecked the box for the little horse, periodically taking it out to examine it as if its folds held the answer to the questions I was asking.
When Dylan was about nine years old, I contracted a nasty eye infection that persisted despite several trips to the doctor. Dylan had been concerned, checking my eyes often to see if they had improved. He was always a physically affectionate child, and I can still summon the sense memory of his hand on my shoulder as he peered anxiously into my eyes. While I was still healing, I discovered a tiny winged horse made of folded paper carefully placed on my desk, along with a note in his childish handwriting. The note said, “I hope my get well Pegasus makes you well. I made him espessially for you. Love, Dylan.”
How could I reconcile the cherub with the halo of golden hair who used to giggle while smashing kisses into my face, and the man—that killer—on screen? How could the person who had made me this get-well Pegasus possibly be the same person I’d seen on that tape? I needed to synthesize my own experience of mothering that boy while acknowledging the person he’d become at the end of his life.
There was no longer any way to avoid the horrific fact that my son had planned and committed nightmarish acts of cruelty. But the gentle-hearted kid who’d made me that Pegasus; the lovely, shy boy who couldn’t resist helping with a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle; the young man whose characteristic bark of a laugh punctuated the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes we watched together—he had been real, too. Who was it I had loved, and why had I loved him?
A friend once e-mailed me the following quotation, and it struck me as so apt that I dug up the book to read more: “Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart,” Rainer Maria Rilke writes in his fourth letter to a young poet. “Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.”
A time would come when my heart would fully open once again to my son—when I could weep not only for his victims, but also for him. I would learn of the deep suffering Dylan experienced, perhaps for years, of which I had been totally unaware. The anxiety disorder and PTSD I would experience myself after Columbine would provide me with firsthand experience in the ways that a crisis in brain health can distort a person’s reasoning. None of this would excuse or lessen what Dylan did. Yet my greater understanding of the brain illness I now believe gripped him enabled me to grieve for him again.
That process would take years. First I had to live the question, and everything unsolved in my heart. Seeing those tapes was the first step. As terrible as the experience was, I had to accept that Dylan had been an active and willing participant in the massacre. Going forward, I would need to piece together the contradictory fragments I had collected in order to understand how Dylan could have hidden a side of himself so entirely from Tom and me, as well as from his teachers, his closest friends, and their parents.
And I was determined to do so, not simply so I could have a context for my own grief and horror, but to understand what I could have done differently.
CHAPTER 11
The Depths of His Despair
These days, when I introduce myself at a conference, I say, “My son died by suicide.” Then I say, “He was one of the shooters in the Columbine tragedy.”
I’m accustomed by now to the jaw drop. Almost invariably, the person says, “I never thought about it that way, but I guess it was a suicide, wasn’t it?”
It never surprises me that people have this reaction. Of course they do; I was Dylan’s mother, and that was my reaction, too. Both the realization that Dylan had died by suicide and the implications of that understanding came in increments, but the import of the realization continues to be felt.
As you’ve probably gathered by now, I have long since given up hoping for a single puzzle piece that will drop into place and finally reveal why Dylan and Eric did what they did. I wish the vectors propelling the boys toward catastrophe had been unambiguous. I am also wary of the many pat explanations that sprang up in the wake of the tragedy. Did school culture and bullying “cause” Columbine? Violent video games? Negligent parenting? The paramilitarization of American popular culture? These are pieces in the greater puzzle, to be sure. But none of them, even in a combination amplifying their individual effects, has ever been enough for me to explain away the kind of hatred and violence the boys displayed.