A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy(17)

Under normal circumstances—if any circumstances involving the death of a child can ever be called normal—we would have called family members and friends to share the awful news. They would have gathered to grieve with us, and to offer support. We would have been kept busy readying the house for visitors, and friends would have come bearing stories, poems, and photographs to honor Dylan. These coping mechanisms in the face of grief are time-honored and shared across many cultures because they are effective; they give families comfort at a time when very little can. For us, nothing could have been further from normal than our lives during the days following Dylan’s death.

Almost everyone who’d ever known us knew of our son’s connection to the Columbine tragedy within hours of it happening, but they couldn’t get in touch with us because we had fled for our lives. Horrified family members and friends who called our home that afternoon either received no answer or found themselves talking to the law enforcement officials still searching our house.

Clearly, we couldn’t have any of our out-of-state family members or close friends come to Littleton to be with us. Even if we had anywhere for them to stay, we couldn’t guarantee their safety. In hiding at Don and Ruth’s house, we were insulated from how frightening the situation in the community was. We wouldn’t really know how much danger we’d been in until I read about one of Tom’s long-lost cousins in the paper: he was going public to say he’d never met Dylan, and begging people to stop sending him death threats. In the forty-eight-hour period following the shootings, a cluster of family members received more than two thousand phone calls from media and members of the community. Not all were threatening, of course—even in the immediate aftermath, people reached out in support—but it was still unmanageable. A local reporter tried to push his way into my eighty-five-year-old aunt’s home in Ohio. (She was proud she’d stood up to him by asking him to leave, though she insisted he take a fresh-baked cookie with him.)

I couldn’t in good conscience invite the people I loved to a community whose grief was mingled with rage toward our family. In choosing seclusion, we had chosen safety. We had also cut ourselves off from the comfort of others who had loved Dylan.

According to the police report released months later, we were officially notified of Dylan’s death on the day after the massacre. I don’t remember it. Neither does Tom. I do remember learning our son’s body had been moved to the coroner’s for autopsy, news that gave a solid, tangible weight to the fact of Dylan’s death it had not yet had for us. I found the idea of him lying, all alone, on a frigid steel table intolerable. I’d been by his side for every visit to the pediatrician, had held his hand for every vaccination; I’d never missed one of his dental appointments. I longed to go to the coroner’s office to be with him, just so he would not have to be alone.

At the same time, Tom and I held out hope for the autopsy, praying the results would come back positive for drugs. At least drug abuse might give us a way to explain how Dylan could have been involved with this monstrous event.

It felt like death surrounded and threatened to suffocate us. Tom began saying he didn’t think he could go on without Dylan, his buddy. That morbid sentiment was one of the only things that could rouse me out of my near-catatonic state: How would I cope if Tom took his own life, too? After what had happened with Dylan, there was no way I could trust myself to take an accurate read on the emotional state of the other members of my family. For all I knew, Tom and Byron were actively planning their own deaths. The thought made me frantic.

I was having suicidal thoughts, myself. It was the most natural thing in the world to explore a way to silence the grief and guilt and shame I felt. But knowing those feelings were a normal response didn’t make them any less scary.

It was also normal for me to worry excessively about Byron, even if it was unhealthy. As soon as he left my sight, I felt anxious and abandoned. I could not let go of the fear that something horrendous was going to happen to him—or that, out of the depths of his despair over what Dylan had done, he was going to do something terrible to himself. This dynamic between us would intensify over the months to come.

Byron had lived a life touched little by loss: he’d only been to a single funeral in his life, for a Little League coach who’d suffered a sudden heart attack. Tom and I had both survived parents and other relatives, and we knew Byron was unprepared for what the next few days would bring. On the other hand, what preparation could there be? Byron’s first real experience of loss would be a catastrophe of such magnitude and incomprehensibility that all of us would spend the rest of our lives struggling to understand it.

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I could not watch television or read the newspaper at Don and Ruth’s house, but I would peek through the cracks once in a while, as you would from a bomb shelter to confirm the utter devastation outside. And so I could not entirely avoid what every headline and front page and news crawl in the world was screaming: “TERROR IN LITTLETON. The two boys believed to have been the shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, were students at Columbine High School….”

I became fixated on the picture that aired over and over: the most terrible school picture Dylan ever had taken, so unflattering that when he brought it home, I urged him to have it reshot. It made him look like the kind of kid teachers as well as students would find a reason to pick on—the guy you’d move your tray to avoid in the lunchroom. It didn’t look like him. Even in my near-madness in those early days after the tragedy, I knew how ridiculous it was for me to be upset that the media were using an unbecoming photograph of Dylan, instead of showing him as the nice-looking young man he had been. My son was an alleged murderer—and there I was, dithering over an ugly photo. It was a spectacular example of the tricks the mind plays when we’re juggling unbearable emotions. Absurd as it was, I wanted Dylan to be shown the way I remembered him.