A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy(24)

The short journey from the bedroom to the kitchen exhausted me, and I gripped the counter to hold myself up. Standing there, I thought suddenly of an unsettling moment I’d had years ago in the hospital, right after Dylan’s birth.

He’d been born in the early morning of September 11, 1981. As with his older brother, Tom and I had named our second son for a poet, the Welsh playwright Dylan Thomas. The sheets in the hospital birthing room had yellow flowers on them, and Dylan’s arrival was so quiet and uneventful I could hear the whispers of nurses in the hallway while I was in labor. He cried out once before settling into my eager arms and squinting into the light.

Like every new mother, I was delighted to meet this brand-new creature I already had such an intimate relationship with. The next morning, we finally got a minute alone, and I was thrilled to kiss his smooth cheeks and wonder at his tiny, perfect fingers and toes. But as I held him, I experienced a deep and unsettling sense of foreboding, strong enough to make me shiver. It was as if a bird of prey had passed overhead, casting us into shadow. Looking down at the perfect bundle in my arms, I was overcome by a strong premonition: this child would bring me a terrible sorrow.

I am not superstitious by nature, and this was a feeling I had never experienced before, and haven’t since. I was so startled by it, I could hardly move. Was this a mother’s intuition? Was my seemingly healthy baby sick? But everything checked out fine, and the hospital sent me home with my new little boy.

Two weeks later, Dylan vomited profusely after a feeding, and then after the next. Badly frightened, I took him to the emergency room. The doctors kept him two nights for observation, but found nothing. At the follow-up visit I insisted upon later that week, three-week-old Dylan was pale, dehydrated, and below his birth weight. By then, the condition had developed enough to show up on an X-ray, and Dylan was diagnosed with pyloric stenosis, a narrowing at the base of the stomach. The doctor sent us back to the hospital. The situation was so serious, Dylan might have died without immediate surgery.

After he pulled through that harrowing ordeal and turned into his sweet, plump, rosy-cheeked baby self, I felt all the obvious relief and more besides, sure that this serious illness—disaster averted—was my premonition realized.

That childhood illness was also the last time, until his junior year of high school, that I ever had real cause to worry about Dylan.





CHAPTER 6


Boyhood



With Dylan as a toddler, playing in the snow.

The Klebold Family





The terror and total disbelief are overwhelming. The sorrow of losing my son, the shame of what he has done, the fear of the world’s hatred. There is no respite from the agony.

—Journal entry, April 1999





I’ve kept a diary most of my life. In late elementary school and junior high, I poured my hopes and dreams onto the pages of little books I kept locked and hidden—not that anyone on earth cared what blouse I’d worn, or where I’d taken my dog for a walk. I filled one page to the bottom, every day. If my sister grew impatient and turned off our bedroom light, I’d finish the page in the dark.

In high school and college, I focused more on writing letters to my sister and my mother and my grandparents, although I did make time to write (bad) poetry. After I married and had children, I journaled whenever I wanted to remember landmark events or cope with difficult emotions. I took pleasure in recording the developmental milestones of both my children, and captured the dates when they noticed their own hands for the first time, or rolled over, or took their first steps. As the boys grew, and managing their busy lives took more of my time, the entries grew shorter and more quotidian: “Byron to dentist, must floss. Dylan’s team won: 6–3!”

In the first days after Columbine, I turned again to writing as an outlet, in a journal Dylan had given me for Christmas. Tom and I always told the boys not to bother buying us expensive gifts, and so I had been touched, in 1997, to find a leather-bound writing journal in my stocking. I made such a fuss over how great it was that Dylan got me another diary for Christmas in 1998, this one with a reproduction of Edvard Munch’s The Scream on the cover. The image seemed ominously symbolic afterward, of course, but at the time I was simply touched by the thoughtful gift—both art-and writing-themed, and therefore perfect for me.

After Columbine, the relief I got from writing felt almost physical, if temporary. My diaries became the place for me to corral the myriad, often-contradictory feelings I had about my son and what he had done. In the earliest days, writing allowed me to process my tremendous grief for the sorrow and suffering Dylan had caused. Before I could reach out personally to the families of the victims, the journals were a place for me to apologize to them with all my heart, and to grieve privately for the losses they had sustained.

The diaries were also a place for me to “set the record straight.” In the immediate aftershock of the tragedy, we weren’t mourning simply Dylan, but also his very identity—and ours. It was impossible to correct the floods of misinformation in the media, but I wanted to tell our side of the story, if only in private. The pages of my notebook became a place for me to silently respond to the people who called us animals and monsters, to correct misapprehensions about my son and our family. Some of those pages reflect my feelings of defensiveness and even anger toward those who judged us without knowing us. I was not proud of those feelings, and was glad to keep them hidden, but they were necessary for me at the time, and I see the details I obsessed over as unwitting testaments to the shock and grief I was feeling.