11/5 Tom is having outpatient hand surgery tomorrow.
11/6 We were at the hospital til 5, then we began our slow trek home through traffic. We stopped for Chinese takeout and medication. We were glad that Dylan stayed home so we could actually eat dinner with him. His car is broken so he was stuck here until a friend picked him up at about 9 to go to a movie. I want so much to be closer to him, but he is absent so much of the time. This is such an important time. He really needs to be planning for his future but he just isn’t moving ahead. At least he was pleasant tonight and ate with us.
11/9 Dylan was cute and pleasant today and actually talked about wanting to go to school in Arizona to escape the weather.
The previous year’s problems appeared to be behind Dylan. He could be moody and irritable, but what teenager isn’t? Sometimes we noted that he was tired, but the computer store job required a lot of hours, and he was taking calculus, advanced video production, English, and psychology, on top of an early morning bowling class.
Without any prompting from us, he kept his appointments with his Diversion counselor, participated in community service at a local park, and took routine drug tests. Although drugs had never been a problem with Dylan, we were relieved to have one less thing to worry about. He started earning back the privileges he’d lost after the arrest, and when his computer store job proved too difficult to maintain around his school and Diversion appointment schedules, he was rehired at Blackjack Pizza.
On September 11, 1998, Dylan turned seventeen. Our gift to him was a nod to his prodigious appetite—a small black refrigerator that he could take with him to college the following year. He loved it, and insisted on carrying it right up to his room, the cord dragging behind. As soon as Nate found out, he showed up with a companion gift: a supersized bucket of fried chicken, all for Dylan.
That month, he volunteered to do the sound for a Halloween production of Frankenstein at school, and rekindled his friendship with Brooks Brown. The two of them had drifted apart after the conflict between Eric and Brooks the previous year, but they fell back into an easy friendship while working on the play.
Dylan was proud of Frankenstein; he used a wide variety of unusual audio sources to develop the eerie soundtrack. The cast and crew recorded a surprise video to thank the drama teacher. In the video, Brooks, Zack, and Dylan clown around—saying they hope she’ll buy them beer, or pay them to pass down their senior year production know-how to the next crop of students. Judy Brown threw the wrap party, and took a picture of Dyl laughing at the video along with everyone else.
Dylan promised he’d finish his college applications by Christmas. We had to nudge him a few times, but he did his usual thorough job, and Tom and I helped him to keep the paperwork straight. We asked him to consider some smaller schools, but he wasn’t interested. He applied to two schools in Colorado and two in Arizona, and we all celebrated when he dropped the four college application packets into the mail.
Christmas was low-key and comfortable. As usual, Dylan led the way in finding and decorating our tree; he always wanted the biggest one we could fit on top of our car. It was an annual tradition for me to drag Tom and the boys to some festive event—a madrigal choir session, or a holiday event at the zoo. That last Christmas, it was dinner at a Moroccan restaurant, where we sat on cushions on the floor and ate without silverware, scooping the spiced dishes into our mouths with pieces of bread.
Dylan had asked Tom if he could borrow some money to buy Christmas gifts, and I was touched to find a hardbound writing journal from him under the tree Christmas morning. It was perfect—thoughtful without being extravagant. I had no idea I’d be pouring my sorrow onto its pages four months later.
Tom and I bought Dylan the long black leather coat he’d asked for. Tom thought it would look ridiculous on Dylan’s lanky frame, and privately I agreed. But several boys at the school wore similar black coats, and he’d already bought a black cotton duster. He thought it was funny when a teacher or some other person in a position of authority saw him and Eric in the hallway and teased: “You look like you’re in the Trench Coat Mafia.” But I didn’t know until after their death that there was a large, loose group of kids at the school who wore long black coats and called themselves that.
A great deal was made of Dylan’s affiliation with the Trench Coat Mafia in the immediate wake of Columbine. It was one of the clues everyone hoped would elucidate what we’d missed—the key to unlock the mystery. Was the Trench Coat Mafia a gang of death-obsessed goths? Neo-Nazis? Satanists? A suicide cult? Like most such leads, the Trench Coat Mafia connection sputtered out without revealing anything—though not before a myth had been created. In fact, the Trench Coat Mafia was just a bunch of kids, some friends, some not, who favored a certain kind of coat to set themselves apart from the kids at Columbine High School who shopped at more conservative stores like Polo or Abercrombie & Fitch. Dylan and Eric hadn’t even thought of themselves as members of the group, although they were friends with a boy, Chris, who was.
Regardless of how we thought the coat would look, it seemed harmless enough, and Dylan was thrilled when he unwrapped it on Christmas morning.
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1/11/99 This long, hard day is over. Tom’s surgery was today. We had to get up at 4:00 AM to be there by 6:00. After sitting and waiting for 13 hours, I just needed to get home. Good thing I did because Dylan hasn’t exactly risen to a level of responsibility in my absence. He overslept and missed a class and was sleeping when I got home. Nothing taken care of that I needed him to do (like take care of the cats). What have I raised?
1/12 Tom is home from the hospital….Dylan has been so reclusive. We’ve hardly seen him & attempts to engage him have been futile. He didn’t even say hi to Tom or ask how he was. It was weird.
In January, about three months before the tragedy, Tom had surgery to replace a portion of his left shoulder joint. I came home from the hospital in the evening to find Dylan had not done what I had asked him to do. I no longer remember what the chore was—probably cutting up some broccoli for dinner, or picking up a quart of milk from the store. A recorded message informed me that he had missed a class. The cats had not been fed, and Dylan was asleep in his room. I was disappointed and irritated he had dropped the ball while I was looking after his father in the hospital, and I told him so.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve shared this story with other suicide loss survivors. “I couldn’t understand why she wasn’t pulling her weight!” a mother I met recently told me, the tears streaming down her face. “I told her to stop being so selfish!” Four days after the argument, her daughter was dead. Sometimes a kid messing up at school or coming at you with a bad attitude about helping at home isn’t a sign they need to be criticized and corrected, but a signal that they need help.
Dylan often appeared tired, and I worried aloud about his course load and Blackjack schedule. Tom and I were both concerned about how listless and withdrawn he was during the week of Tom’s surgery, so we took him out for Chinese food as soon as Tom was up to it, a few days after the operation. The meal passed pleasantly, and we were placated.