A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy(11)
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked, genuinely baffled. She’d told the police, she said.
The house phone rang constantly. The detective called me to the phone to speak to my elderly aunt. She’d heard about a shooting in Littleton. (Dylan’s name had not yet been mentioned on air.) She was in frail health, and I worried about telling her the truth, but realized that protecting her would soon be impossible.
I said as gently as possible, “Please prepare yourself for the worst. The police are here. They think Dylan is involved.” As she protested, I repeated what I had already said. What had been inconceivable hours before had already begun to solidify into a new and horrible reality. Just as nebulous shapes resolve into letters and numbers with every progressive click of the machine at the eye doctor’s, so was the magnitude of the horror starting to come into focus for me. Everything was still an incomprehensible blur, but I already knew two things: this would not be the case for much longer, and the confusion was resolving into a truth I did not believe I could bear.
I promised my aunt I would be in touch, and hung up to keep the line open for communication from the school.
As the shadows lengthened, time slowed. Tom and I muddled through our uncertainty in hushed whispers. We had no choice but to accept Dylan’s involvement, but neither of us could believe he had participated in a shooting under his own free will. He must have become mixed up with a criminal, somehow, or a group of them, who forced him to participate. We even considered that someone had threatened to harm us, and he had gone along in order to protect us. Maybe he had gone into the school thinking it was a harmless joke, some kind of theater, only to learn at the last minute he was using live ammunition?
I simply could not, would not, believe Dylan participated voluntarily in hurting people. If he had, the kind, funny, goofy kid that we loved so much must have been tricked, threatened, coerced, or even drugged into doing it.
Later we would learn that Dylan’s friends spun similar explanations for the events unfurling around them. Not one of them considered he might willingly be involved. None of us would learn the true level of his involvement—or the depths of his rage, alienation, and despair—until many months later. Even then, many of us would struggle to reconcile the person we knew and loved with what he’d done that day.
We stayed out there in the driveway, suspended in limbo, the passing hours marked only by our helpless confusion as we careened from hope to dread. The phone rang and rang and rang. Then the glass storm door of our house once again swung open, and this time I could hear the television Tom had left on in our bedroom, echoing inside the empty rooms. A local news anchor was reporting from outside Columbine High School. I heard him say the latest reports had twenty-five people dead.
Like mothers all over Littleton, I had been praying for my son’s safety. But when I heard the newscaster pronounce twenty-five people dead, my prayers changed. If Dylan was involved in hurting or killing other people, he had to be stopped. As a mother, this was the most difficult prayer I had ever spoken in the silence of my thoughts, but in that instant I knew the greatest mercy I could pray for was not my son’s safety, but for his death.
CHAPTER 2
Slivers of Glass
As the afternoon turned to twilight and then to darkness, I let go of my last hope that Dylan would zoom up the drive in the dented old black BMW he’d fixed up with his dad, laughing and wondering about dinner.
Late in the day, I cornered a member of the SWAT team and asked him a question, point-blank:
“Is my son dead?”
“Yes,” he told me. As soon as he said it, I realized I had already known it to be true.
“How did he die?” I asked him. It seemed important to know. Had Dylan been killed by the police or by one of the shooters? Had he taken his own life? I hoped he had. At least if Dylan died by suicide, I’d know he had wanted to die. Later, I would come to regret that wish almost as bitterly as I’ve ever regretted anything.
The SWAT team member shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. And then he turned away, leaving me alone.
? ? ?
It will perhaps seem callous that my focus was so squarely on Dylan—on the question of his safety, and later on the fact of his death. But my obligation is to offer the truth to the degree to which my memory will allow, even when that truth reflects badly on me. And the truth is that my thoughts were with my son.
Over the course of the afternoon, I had come to understand Dylan was suspected of shooting people, but this fact registered with me only in an abstract way at first. I was convinced Dylan could not have been responsible for taking anyone’s life. I was beginning to accept he had been physically present during the shootings, but Dylan had never hurt anyone or anything in his life, and I knew in my heart he could not have killed anyone. I was wrong, of course—about that and many things. At the time, though, I was sure.
So, in those first hours and even days, I wasn’t thinking about the victims or about the anguish of their loved ones and friends. Just as our bodies experience shock when we experience extreme trauma—we’ve all heard stories of soldiers in combat who run for miles unaware of a severed limb—a similar phenomenon occurs with severe psychological trauma. A mechanism to preserve our sanity kicks in and lets in only what we can bear, a little at a time. It is a defense mechanism, breathtaking in its power both to shield and to distort.