The next thirty minutes were wasted. I cried in the bathroom for half of it, and walked around in a daze for the rest. My need to talk to another mother who had lost a child to suicide was even greater than I had known. When Celia reached out, I grabbed hold of what she was offering like I was grabbing for a rope, mid-fall.
We spent almost an hour in two plush chairs in the hotel lobby, holding hands and sharing. I was careful not to divulge specifics about Dylan that might put Celia in legal jeopardy. Meanwhile, her own story broke my heart. She’d lost her son so young! At least I had been able to see Dylan as a young man.
I knew I wasn’t the only mother who’d had absolutely no idea how troubled her beloved child had been, but I’d had few opportunities to feel the kinship that comes from talking to someone who has also lost someone to suicide. It helped that Celia was so pretty and well put-together, so intelligent and articulate—the kind of woman I would have admired under any circumstances. Her sophisticated normality was a balm, as I had unwittingly bought into many of the ignorant myths about suicide.
As we tearfully hugged good-bye, I felt closer to her than I felt to anyone in the world. “I can’t imagine what you’re going through,” people would say, shaking their heads—and they were right. I say that without judgment. Who could imagine going through something like this? I certainly could not have. Surrounded as I was by love and support, I felt completely adrift from normal experience—and indeed, from myself. It was, I came to realize, how Dylan must have felt at the end of his life.
There had been no relief for me on the horizon, no indication it would ever feel any different, until Celia put her hand on mine. With one gesture, she had connected me to a society of survivors who would welcome me without hatred or judgment. For the first time, I felt a gleam of hope that I might not have to spend the rest of my life spinning on my own solitary planet, grappling with feelings no one else could understand.
Somewhere out there, there was a tribe of people who would see me as a sister, a partner, a soul mate—who would allow me to join them in making a contribution.
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In the second year after Dylan’s death, I finally found that community.
It had been painful to feel so profoundly alienated from the place where we had made our home. I had always chatted easily with the barista at Starbucks, and I knew the names of all the women at the supermarket checkout. After Columbine, I anxiously watched people’s body language and facial micro-expressions to see whether they recognized me. Luckily, 99.9 percent of the people who did had something kind to say, but cringing like a frightened animal in the place where we’d made our home had shaken my sense of myself.
Much has been written about what happened in Littleton in the wake of the tragedy. As humans go into shock after an assault on their bodies, so do communities. As President Clinton said on the night of the massacre, “If it could happen in a place like Littleton…” This wasn’t the drug-riddled inner city, or some supposedly godless corridor like New York or Los Angeles. People who lived in Littleton were upstanding citizens with nice suburban houses and happy, healthy, well-fed children. We expected our schools to be safe.
In the months after Columbine, everyone who lived in the area felt exposed and frightened. The whole place was a bundle of raw nerves, and people responded in all kinds of ways. Some tapped in to a vein of forgiveness and compassion. Others lashed out. Many who’d never had a voice before gained a sense of power and importance. Some were seduced by it; others genuinely felt they could do some good by speaking out.
Blame swirled. Too many guns were the problem, said one faction. There hadn’t been enough guns, said another; every teacher should be armed. A lack of family values was to blame, shouted the Religious Right. Still others claimed that the Religious Right had co-opted the community’s mourning. Amid all this, people were trying to mourn the dead and heal the injured, while scrambling to rebuild a sense of community, a sense of safety, a sense of self.
The natural response to tragedy is to look for meaning: How could this happen? Who is responsible? Tom and I were the chief suspects. “Those boys could only have learned hate like that in their homes,” editorials thundered. The things people wrote and said were painful to us, but we were far from the only ones to find the climate divisive.
Like porcupines, people roll into a ball to protect their soft centers, projecting their spikes outward. This defensive mode is a natural response to being attacked, and there were a lot of spikes in Littleton in those days. The school, the media, the police—everyone involved seemed to be simultaneously fending off an attack while launching one of their own.
The sheriff’s department was doing meticulous work, but the public was learning they had also failed to follow through on Judy and Randy Brown’s repeated warnings about Eric. His website was quoted extensively in the search warrants served on the day of the massacre, proving someone in the department had known about it. One claim had even been pursued: when investigators had found evidence that Eric was building pipe bombs, they drew up a warrant to search the Harris house. But the warrant was never taken before a judge, the house was never searched, and the investigation report did not surface until long after the tragedy.
As the public lost confidence in the sheriff’s department, people began to demand more information. The autopsy report of a minor is usually sealed, but the most important findings—that there had been no drugs in Dylan’s system, for instance—had already been released. I did not see what anyone had to gain from knowing what was in his stomach when he died, or how much his organs weighed. Even with our lawyers’ help, we lost that fight, and the autopsy results were picked over and published. I felt sick. Even in this, we had failed to protect Dylan.
The media swarm had receded somewhat, but there was still a Columbine-related headline on the front page of the local news almost every day. Some reporters were digging into the ongoing investigation, and trying to get a real understanding of the dynamics at the school. Others were less ethical. When Columbine crime scene photos of Eric and Dylan lying dead in pools of blood were sold to the National Enquirer and published, it seemed there was no line that couldn’t be crossed. Later, though, I would learn that many journalists had also been traumatized by the time they spent in Littleton.
Meanwhile, Tom and I were sitting in the eerily silent eye of the storm. Even while our own inner circle continued to be an immense source of strength (and an insulation from the hostility of the outside world), the tension in our own relationship was rising. It would only get worse as the sense of solace and purpose I found in the company of other suicide loss survivors grew.
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