Even as I found solidarity in this community, I stood apart. Coming to understand Dylan’s death as a suicide provided some degree of comfort for me, and I must admit part of me would have liked to stop there. But I was never foolish enough to delude myself that Dylan was the only one who had been lost on the day he took his own life.
Long after I came to accept Dylan’s depression and desire to die by suicide, I was still grappling with the reality of his violence. The person I saw raging on the Basement Tapes had been completely unrecognizable, a stranger in my son’s body. This person—raised in my home, the child I believed I had imbued with my values, whom I had taught to say please and thank you and to have a firm handshake—had killed other people, and planned even greater destruction.
Understanding his death as a suicide was an important first step. But it was only the beginning.
CHAPTER 17
Judgment
I try to find something that gives me a sense of peace and I can’t find one thing. Not writing, drawing, nature. I feel on the edge of disaster all the time. I’m still weeping over Dylan and hating myself for what he did. The image of him on the video is plastered on my brain. I feel as if his entire life and death are unresolved and I haven’t grieved yet or put any of this into perspective. Everything I think about to comfort myself is a double-edged sword.
—Journal entry, August 2003
Four years after Columbine, the date was set for our depositions. Finally, the nameless dread that had hung over us during four years of our grief had crystallized into an item on the calendar.
Our lawyers explained that a deposition was sworn out-of-court testimony that the plaintiffs could use to gather information for a lawsuit if the claims against us progressed to a trial by jury. Tom and I and the Harrises would each spend a day answering questions before a close-knit group of bereaved parents. We would sit, face to face, with the grieving parents of the children Dylan and Eric had murdered. I would see the sorrow in their eyes, and know my son was responsible for putting it there. The thought filled me with terror.
I had already resigned myself to financial disaster. The media had portrayed us as wealthy, in part because my grandfather had been a successful businessman. But he’d left his estate to a charitable foundation, and our home, which looked like a massive compound from the aerial shots that appeared on TV, had been a fixer-upper. So we’d lose our home and have to declare bankruptcy. What was that in comparison to what we’d already been through?
The depositions would be difficult, but once they were done—whatever the outcome—at least they’d be over.
? ? ?
Dream made me cry all the way to work. Dylan was a baby, about the size of a doll. I was trying to find a way to lay him down, but there was nowhere safe to put him. I was in a dormitory and found a room full of drawers like a morgue or mausoleum. All the women in the room had a place to put their babies. But I had neglected to put a name on a drawer for him, so there was no place to lay him down. He was tired and needed to rest but I had not managed to make a safe place for him to go.
—Journal entry, April 2003
We were already widely blamed, but the depositions would be the decisive appraisal of our competence as parents. Ultimately our fate would rest in the hands of people who hadn’t known our son, and who hadn’t interacted with us as a family. It didn’t take an outside committee to make me feel I had failed Dylan. Each day I cataloged hundreds of things I wished I had done differently.
It seemed highly likely we would be held responsible. On the Basement Tapes, Dylan and Eric were blatantly homicidal and suicidal, whipping weapons around like toys. Tom and I had recognized Dylan’s room in one segment, so the weapons had been in our home at least one night. The intensity of our son’s rage on the tapes made the entire family seem culpable. What could possibly be said to prove his violent tendencies had been hidden? Although it was the truth, I couldn’t see how anyone would believe it. I barely believed it myself.
I thought often in those days of a young woman I’d met while teaching in a program for at-risk young adults working to get GEDs. Over lunch, she’d told me a story from her childhood. A classmate kept stealing her lunch money. Tired of going hungry, she finally told her father, who threw her into an empty bathtub and beat her with his belt until she could not stand.
“Don’t you ever come to me because you can’t handle your own business,” he told her. She went to school the next day with a rake handle, which she used to beat the girl who had been stealing from her. Nobody ever bothered her again.
“It was the biggest favor he ever did me,” she said, openly amused by my shocked look and the sandwich I’d abandoned.
I had been appalled by the story; it haunted me for years. But as we headed toward the depositions, I thought a lot about what it meant to be a good parent. At the time, I’d judged her father to be abusive, but my student had told the story with love and respect. She believed her dad had parented her appropriately, and indeed he had prepared her for the rough environment in which they lived. Had I missed the point? Certainly I was in no position to judge. Perhaps all of us were doing the best we could with the experience, knowledge, and resources we had.
The only thing I knew for sure was that Dylan had participated in the massacre in spite of the way he had been raised, not because of it. What I didn’t know was how I could possibly convey this to the families of the people he had killed. Even if I could, it would never alleviate the magnitude of their suffering. Nothing would.
? ? ?
Our original statement of apology had been published in the newspaper, as well as the one we released on the first anniversary of the massacre. But whenever anyone we knew said anything to the press, the quote was taken out of context. We were threatened, and often felt afraid. Unfortunately, our inaccessibility and failure to speak up in our own defense had led people to believe we were hiding secrets.
I’d written those difficult letters to each one of the victims’ families. Then I had withdrawn to spare them the painful intrusion of hearing from me, even though I wanted nothing more in the world than a connection with them. I had spoken the names of their loved ones like a mantra every day, and yet the only points of contact between us came through our lawyers, or from reading about each other in the paper.
I wanted to bridge that distance. I knew from studying other violent incidents that it could significantly reduce trauma if the perpetrator’s family could sit down with victims to apologize in person, to cry and hug and talk. As impossible as it was to envision, acknowledging each other’s humanity seemed like the best course of action; as painful as that interaction would surely be, I craved it.
Eventually, I had to let that go. I was the last person who could ask for a meeting, and couldn’t run the risk of re-traumatizing someone by imposing myself. Each family’s recovery from loss is their own. I can only say here that if speaking with or meeting me would be helpful to any of the family members of Dylan and Eric’s victims, I will always be available to them.