A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy(16)
The day before his prom, Dylan had sat shoulder to shoulder with his father, looking at the floor plans of various dorm rooms, working out the comparative square footage of each configuration. At six foot four (and as someone who’d never shared a bedroom with anyone before), Dylan had wanted to secure as much real estate as possible. I’d laughed, then, to see the two of them there, scribbling sums on scrap paper. It was so quantitative—and so like Dylan!—to choose his college dorm room by using math.
Those memories were so recent as to be still warm, and reflecting back on them threw me into even greater confusion. Was any of that the behavior of a person preparing to go on a killing spree?
This only started to make sense when I began to learn more about people who are planning to die by suicide. They often make concrete plans for the future: surviving family members are frequently baffled by recently purchased cars and booked cruises. Talking with people who have survived their own suicide attempts has helped researchers to shed light on the mystery. In some cases, these future plans are a way to throw concerned friends and family members off a trail of suicidal behavior. If you were concerned a person close to you was planning self-harm, wouldn’t your concerns be assuaged if they booked a cruise?
In other cases, such plans are simply sign and symptom of the genuinely “broken” logic driving the suicidal brain. They may signal the ambivalence the person feels—a desire to live that is, at times, as strong as the desire to die. A person with intent to self-harm can also believe simultaneously in both realities: that they will take a Caribbean vacation, and that they will have died by suicide before they have the chance to go.
I knew none of this then, and so the idea of Dylan eagerly making plans for his future at college while planning a shooting rampage that would end in his own death seemed absurd—and thus more evidence that he could not have meant to participate.
In the months and years to follow, I would be forced many times to confront everything I did not know about my son. This Pandora’s box will never empty; I will spend the rest of my life reconciling the reality of the child I knew with what he did. That night was the last time I was able to hold Dylan in my mind exactly as I had held him in life: a beloved son, brother, and friend.
And so it was that, when the blue-gray light of dawn finally appeared through the basement windows, I was still asking the question—first to Dylan, and then to God—the question that would bedevil and perplex me, and ultimately animate the rest of my life: “How could you? How could you do this?”
CHAPTER 3
Someone Else’s Life
Yesterday, my life entered the most abhorrent nightmare anyone could possibly imagine. I can’t even write.
—Journal entry, April 21, 1999
The next morning, it felt as if I’d been dropped without warning into someone else’s life.
Just the month before, an old friend had come to town. Catching up over dinner, I’d told her my life had never been more satisfying. I had recently turned fifty. I had a loving husband, and a marriage that had withstood twenty-eight years of ups and downs. Byron was fully supporting himself, and sharing an apartment with a friend. Dylan had recovered from an episode of trouble in his junior year and had done a great job of getting back on track; he was heading into the homestretch before graduation, hanging out with his friends and planning for college. I even had a little free time to draw and paint. The single biggest worry in my life, I told her, was the declining health of our beloved elderly cat, Rocky.
On April 20, 1999, I woke up an ordinary wife and mother, happy to be shepherding my family through the daily business of work, chores, and school. Fast-forward twenty-four hours, and I was the mother of a hate-crazed gunman responsible for the worst school shooting in history. And Dylan, my golden boy, was not only dead, but a mass murderer.
The disconnect was so profound that I could not wrap my head around it. Over the course of that first night in Don and Ruth’s basement guest room, I had come to accept that Dylan was dead, but Tom and I were still in complete denial that he could have taken the lives of others.
More than anything else, this is what stands out about those early days in the aftermath of Columbine: the way we were able to cling, in strange and stubborn ways, to an unreality shielding us from a truth we could not yet bear. But those contortions could not protect us for very long from the wrath of a community we had come to love, or from the emerging truth about our son.
? ? ?
Don and Ruth were infallibly generous and kind, but they were utterly helpless in the face of our bewilderment and grief, as anyone would have been.
I could barely speak. When I did open my mouth to make a comment, more often than not, I’d trail off mid-thought. The idea of eating was inconceivable: a fork looked like an alien instrument in my hand, and the mere smell of Ruth’s delicious cooking made my stomach churn.
I was exhausted, lower in energy than I’d ever been in my life, moving through the hours as if buried in wet cement. I dimly remember a worried Ruth covering me with an afghan as I lay motionless on her couch. Sleep provided only a temporary reprieve: the second I became conscious, I’d be crushed all over again by the enormity of what Dylan had done, and by the senselessness of it. It’s a cliché, I suppose, to say I was behaving like a zombie, but that is the closest description I have for the way I felt in those early days.