I was going through changes of my own. In September, after an extended period of political upheaval at the college where I worked, I started a new job, coordinating a small grant to help people with disabilities in the community college system acquire computer skills. I only had to go to the office four days a week, but I took a fairly significant pay cut. The grant was also time-limited, which added a degree of uncertainty. My commute was almost an hour longer than it had been, and I found it a little unsettling to know it would take me so long to get to my kids if they needed me.
The biggest stressor in our lives, though, was the rapid and alarming decline in Tom’s health. For years he’d complained of joint pain: stiff knees, a sore neck, sharp shooting pains he described as ice picks in his toes. He experienced periods of unexplained weakness, and a series of crippling migraines like little strokes, which left him temporarily unable to see or to speak. A diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis, right about the time Dylan entered high school, explained the chronic pain. RA is degenerative, so Tom was afraid his health would continue to worsen, leaving him disabled and unable to work.
One morning at breakfast, while he was lifting a carton of orange juice, a tendon snapped in his arm. The two of us stared dumbly at his thumb, which was no longer a working digit, but dangled loosely from his hand. Tom is a bull for whom no project is too daunting, a man who’d think nothing of working an eighteen-hour day swinging a sledgehammer, who’d lay concrete until his knees bled—and he’d been vanquished by a half-gallon of Tropicana. He was falling apart.
The constant pain, combined with his uncertainty, meant he couldn’t work the long days expected of a geophysicist. This added to our financial anxiety, especially with Dylan’s college tuition looming ahead of us. He cut back on projects around the house, although our fixer-upper still needed a lot of fixing up. And he couldn’t go for his beloved evening runs, which had been his primary means of staying in shape, and a way for him to relieve stress.
We all could have used a better stress-relief valve. Between our money worries, Tom’s increasingly serious illness, my new job, and Byron’s instability, I felt like a captain keeping a ship on course through a storm while reassuring my panicking crew. Most nights, I would fall into bed so exhausted I could barely manage to brush my teeth, and often lay awake worrying that our family wouldn’t be okay at all.
Disruptions like these—especially money worries, and a parent undergoing a health crisis—are risk factors for depression and suicide in teens, and a combination of them significantly increases risk.
We did notice Dylan was crankier with us than usual. We had a gentle household, overall. We weren’t door slammers or yellers, and our boys weren’t allowed to talk back, or to use bad language in front of us or any other adult. Even during the worst of our struggles with Byron, I was proud that we were always able to talk civilly with each other. Being a teenager, Dylan managed anyway to convey his sullenness and irritation. If I asked him to slow down when he was driving, he’d reward me with a long, slow sigh, and he’d drive like a granny for a couple of miles to make sure I got the point. “Would you please change your sheets before you go out?” I’d ask, and he’d roll his eyes almost imperceptibly as he was turning away to go do it.
I didn’t enjoy this behavior, but took it in stride. Lots of other moms were dealing with much worse in the disrespect department. With Dylan, there were still flashes of sweetness to keep us from worrying too much. When I worried about his mood swings or his irritability, he’d cheerfully run an errand with me, or join Tom and me for dinner and keep us laughing until we forgot our concerns. He wasn’t the kind of kid you could stay worried about for long.
Until he was. Because that year, as if everything going on with Tom and Byron and our finances weren’t enough, the one family member who had always seemed to get through life without much trouble began to have problems of his own.
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Dylan turned sixteen in September. When Tom and I suggested a party, he demurred: “Guys, I don’t want to make a big deal out of this.” But a sixteenth birthday is a milestone, and Tom and I wanted to mark it for Dylan.
Our family tradition was to go to a restaurant of the celebrant’s choice. That year, Dylan chose a barbecue restaurant with a 1940s classic movie theme. Byron couldn’t get anyone to cover him at work. While we hated for him to miss his brother’s birthday celebration, we were pleased to see evidence of his work ethic and supported his decision not to attend. Plus, Tom and I had a surprise planned: although Dylan’s friend Zack also had to work that night, we’d arranged for Eric and Nate to meet us at the restaurant.
Dylan was genuinely surprised to see his friends. So surprised, it took him half the evening to loosen up and start enjoying himself. I was sympathetic. He was attuned to the slightest of social discomforts, though Nate and Eric found us much less embarrassing than he did. Dylan knew of our intolerance for rudeness and picky eaters as well, and was probably worried about how his friends would behave. Over the course of the night, though, he relaxed, and with good humor he thanked us for overriding his protests and surprising him. But the roller-coaster ride was about to begin.
Later that month, he woke up in the middle of the night with terrible stomach pains. We were concerned enough to take him to the emergency room, where they ruled out appendicitis and everything else. Puzzled, the doctors released him, and he appeared to recover completely. I would later learn that unexplained somatic symptoms, particularly abdominal pain, may be a marker for depression.
Then, two days later, at the beginning of October 1997, Tom received a call from the school. Dylan had been suspended. The news was a shock. It was the first time either of our boys had been disciplined at school.
Dylan’s interest in server maintenance and network administration had led one of the teachers to ask if he and his friend Zack would help maintain the Columbine High School computer system. Digging around in the system, the boys discovered a list of locker combinations. Dylan opened and closed one or two locker doors to see if the list was current, then transferred the data to a disk and shared it with Eric. Zack took it a little further and left a note in the locker of his girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend. The boys were caught, and an administrator at the school informed us that Dylan was to be suspended for five days.
Tom and I thought the punishment was unnecessarily harsh. Dylan deserved a disciplinary consequence for his involvement; he had no right to dig into school records. But he’d only opened the lockers to see if he could, and closed them without touching anything. Tom in particular felt the punishment failed to show the boys why the offense was wrong, and alienated them from their school when it would be better for them to feel connected to it. We both hoped the school would consider a warning or probationary period instead of banishment, and arranged to meet with the dean.
It was not a good meeting. There was nothing in the rulebook to cover what the boys had done. In the absence of written policy, the administration had decided to treat the boys as if they had brought a weapon to school.
I was shocked. What they had done seemed closer to sneaking into the girls’ bathroom, or an act of academic dishonesty like plagiarism or cheating. I wasn’t minimizing the offense (nor would I have thought it was okay to sneak into the girls’ bathroom). But the boys hadn’t brought a weapon to school, or done anything like it.