I truly see no reason to continue living. I have a mammogram on Wednesday. I’m even fantasizing about having a fatal disease so I could say, “How long do I have to stick around before I can get out of here?” I make no contributions to life and derive no pleasure from it. Fantasize about saving a child from disaster and dying in the process, or offering my life to terrorists to save a planeload of people.
—Journal entry, January 2001
On Valentine’s Day of 2001, almost two years after Dylan’s participation in the massacre at Columbine High School, I was diagnosed with breast cancer.
In a sense, I wasn’t surprised. You know those Halloween costumes made to look like the handle of an ax is protruding from your chest? That was what I felt like all the time. The heart is where you hold and nurture a child, and a virtual bomb had been set off in mine. My son was dead, and fourteen other people because of him. It made sense there would be some collateral damage.
Fear of death had been a constant companion of mine since childhood, and an intensified version of it set in quickly after my diagnosis, adding to already sky-high levels of anxiety. A few days afterward, Tom took me out to our favorite neighborhood Chinese restaurant. At the end of the meal, when I broke open my fortune cookie, there was nothing inside.
My oncologist approached me thoughtfully. Because they’d caught the cancer early, and because the tumor was small, she felt I might be able to do radiation treatment and avoid chemotherapy. Due to persistent stomach problems related to grief and anxiety in the wake of the tragedy, I had already lost about twenty-five pounds—weight I could not afford to lose. Grief and guilt had dramatically depleted my physical and emotional reservoirs. The treatment path was my choice, but the truth sat unspoken between us. I was so run-down and haggard I did not look like someone who would survive a brutal round of chemotherapy. I elected not to do it.
There’s a Susan G. Komen cancer outreach program in our community. After your diagnosis, a breast cancer survivor comes to your house to give you information and encouragement. (The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention has a similar visitation program for suicide loss survivors, called the Survivor Outreach Program. I’m on the board of our local chapter, currently working to bring that program to Colorado.) When I saw the breast cancer support group information my volunteer had brought, I could only shake my head. I needed a support group, that was true—but not for cancer.
Radiation causes exhaustion and physical discomfort, but I was already there. With the help of family and friends and a terrific medical team, I got through my treatment. After my final radiation session, the staff of the clinic presented me with a card they’d signed. It’s likely this is a kindness they perform for every patient, but the gesture devastated me, and I fled to the safety of my car to cry.
I didn’t know why I was crying. Maybe because it had felt so good to be taken care of. Or because the end of my treatment meant I’d have to go back, full-time, to grieving for Dylan and struggling to understand what he’d done.
It’s funny I don’t have more to say about surviving cancer; I certainly didn’t feel detached or blasé about it when it was happening. It was treated, and I moved on with gratitude. But after I recovered, I realized I’d been wrong in the journal entry that begins this chapter: I did not want to die.
Tom would often say he wished Dylan had killed us too, or that we’d never been born at all. I prayed I’d pass away in my sleep, a quiet deliverance from the agony of waking up and realizing it hadn’t all been a terrible nightmare. Sitting in traffic, I’d fantasize about being given the opportunity to trade my life for the people who had died at the school, or being presented with the chance to sacrifice myself to save a large group. Dying would be a relief, I thought, and dying to save others would give my miserable life purpose.
Surviving breast cancer helped me to see (as perhaps we all should) that my life was a gift. My work, going forward, would be to find a way to honor that gift.
CHAPTER 16
A New Awareness
It’s widely acknowledged among those who grieve that the second year is often worse than the first. The first year, you’re trying to adjust to the newness of the suffering, and to get through the days. It’s during the second year that you realize you’ve lost sight of the shoreline. There’s nothing but emptiness ahead and behind, a vast loneliness stretching out as far as you can see. This, you realize, is permanent. There will be no turning back.
My grief was amplified by the agony of knowing that so many families were going through something similar because of my son. The image of Dylan, so hate-and rage-filled on the tapes, battled with my own memories of the playful kid I’d loved so much. Some days, it felt like a war was taking place inside of me.
A few things helped. I couldn’t yet make any art, but as I lay in bed I would sometimes imagine I was drawing. Specifically, I imagined I was drawing trees.
I have always loved trees. I’m inspired by their fortitude and character—their knots and scars and burls, the sites of so many injuries and so much life—and by their generosity, the way they uncomplainingly provide shade and oxygen and food and shelter and fuel. Trees are both deeply grounded and aspirational; they never stop reaching. They feel like friends, and the idea of drawing them became a safe and comforting place for me to park my mind. But I could not yet put pencil to paper.
Indeed, I would not achieve the integration I sought until I found two nutrients essential to so many survivors. First, I found community and then I found a way to contribute.
? ? ?
Met C. Her son D. killed himself at 12 after a bad day at school. It was over a year and a half ago and she still cries all the time. I cried hard all the way home and realized how much I want to be in a support group. Will lock cats out tonight so I can sleep.
—Journal entry, July 1999
Less than three months after the shootings, my supervisor sent me to a large regional conference for rehabilitation professionals. I debated about whether to go; while I had come to feel a little more comfortable with my coworkers, I wasn’t sure I was ready to be out in the wider world. Ultimately I asked the organizers to hold my nametag behind the registration table until I asked them for it. By then, such precautions had become a way of life.
When I went to claim my badge, one of the two women behind the table looked up. “Sue Klebold?” she asked. I tensed, as I would for years. But the lovely dark-haired woman reached across the table for my hand. “I’m Celia. I want you to know many people understand what you’re going through right now.” Her voice was warm, but she did not smile. When she continued, I understood why. “My twelve-year-old son died by suicide last year,” she said.
I had received an enormous amount of sympathy, and many letters of commiseration. Our friends and my colleagues had been wonderful but I always felt the distance between their experiences and my own. Celia’s hand on mine, and those words—“many people understand what you’re going through”—tethered me back to the world, providing a deep and automatic consolation, the way a distraught toddler’s tears stop as soon as he’s swept up into his mother’s arms. I asked Celia if she might have some time to sit and talk, and she told me she’d be relieved from the registration desk in half an hour.