A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy(15)
Don and Ruth’s greeting was warm but quiet as they helped us unload the car. I was profoundly thankful when Byron arrived minutes after we did. We set up camp in the basement apartment. I was relieved to see two alert faces with bright-orange cheeks peering out at their new surroundings when I removed the towels from the birdcage. Because of Ruth’s allergies, we put our two cats, Rocky and Lucy, in the utility room, and they slunk behind the dryer in the unfamiliar space. I wished I could do the same.
When we joined Don and Ruth upstairs, I discovered that being inside a normal home was even more nightmarish than the frantic limbo we’d endured outside of our own. Those long hours in the driveway, we’d been suspended in time, without any access to news. But Don and Ruth, like everyone else in the country (and, we would discover later, around the world) were glued to the nonstop television coverage of the shootings.
We went from having no information to having too much. The chaos inside my mind was hard enough to bear, but the sudden flood of televised speculation and information was infinitely worse. We could see the horrifying aftermath of what our son had done, the incongruity of a triage center set up on a suburban front lawn. We could hear the shock and horror in the voices of the kids who had escaped the school, see the grim looks on the faces of the first responders. There was no escaping the enormity of it all.
The eyewitness descriptions were so horrific I could feel them bouncing right off my brain. It must have been then, too, that I heard early descriptions of the victims for the first time, although I do not remember that part. I would later learn it is common for people in the immediate throes of desperate grief to experience this type of denial, and in the years since, I have talked with many people who are puzzled and ashamed by it—as I was—but the brain takes in only what it can bear.
Outside our home, insulated from news, we’d still been able to keep the tragedy at arm’s length. All at once, it was suffocatingly close: the difference between seeing a fire at a distance and standing knee-deep in live coals while the inferno rages around you. When I began to moan, “My God. This can’t be true. I can’t watch this,” Ruth quickly told Don to turn off the TV. The silence was better, even if the echoes of the horrors we’d seen and heard still bounced off the walls around us.
Near midnight, it became clear our hosts needed to go to bed. All day long, I had wanted privacy so I could collapse in grief, and silence so I could focus on the incomprehensible situation and the loss of my son. With that moment upon me, though, I felt terrified of being alone with the unspeakable truth.
Ruth put fresh sheets on the guest beds in the basement and then left us. Byron was to sleep on a hideaway bed in the downstairs office, right outside the spare room where Tom and I were staying. I left the door open all night, so I could see the lump Byron’s feet made under the blanket; it was vital for me to know he was there. I must have checked for that lump a hundred times.
As the house grew quiet, Tom and I lay sleepless beside one another, touching each other’s hands and shoulders to offer what precious little comfort there was to be had. We had lost our son: Dylan was dead. We did not know where, or in what condition, his body was. We did not know if he had taken his own life, or if he had been killed by the police, or by his friend. Despite the horrifying reports we had heard on the news, we still did not know exactly what he had done.
That first night, the idea that Dylan could have been centrally involved in this monstrous event was beyond my ability to grasp, and I refused it. Instead, I conjured a million alternative explanations. I could not fathom how Dylan could have obtained a gun, or why he would have wanted one. I obsessed instead on a million other possible scenarios: Was he duped into participating, thinking the ammunition was fake? Had it been a prank gone terribly wrong? Had he been forced to participate, under some kind of duress? I told myself that even if our son had been a part of what had happened, he hadn’t necessarily shot anyone. Both Tom and I believed with all of our hearts that Dylan could not have killed anyone, and we clung, not just for hours and days, but for months, to that belief.
In the long hours of that night, and in the following days, my mind would only occasionally light upon the idea that there were people Dylan might have hurt, but then that intolerable thought would skitter away just as fast. It shames me, even now, to admit this. At the time, I simply felt crazy. By many standards, I was.
After Tom fell into a fitful sleep, I pressed a pillow against my face to silence my sobbing. For the first time I truly understood how “heartbroken” had come to describe a sensation of terrible, terrible grief. The pain was actual, physical, as if my heart had been smashed to jagged fragments in my chest. “Heartbroken” was no longer a metaphor, but a description.
I did not sleep, and my thoughts as I lay there were as circular and disjointed as they’d been all day. I’d told the detective Dylan had attended prom the weekend before with a big group of his friends, and I returned to my memories of that night and the next day. I’d gotten up from bed to check in with him when he got home early the morning after prom. He’d had a great night, and thanked me for buying his ticket. He’d danced! Not for the first time in his life, I had reflected on how our youngest son always seemed to do things right. I’ve done a good job with this kid, I’d thought to myself as I returned to my room that night. A mere seventy-two hours later, and I was lying rigid in an unfamiliar bed, that feeling of warm satisfaction supplanted by utter confusion, growing horror, and sorrow. Integrating the two realities seemed impossible.