A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy(29)
By junior high, the gifted program Dylan was in had come to an end. Like many kids that age, he was excruciatingly conscious of anything that might make him stand out from the crowd. In junior high, he told me, it wasn’t cool to be smart.
Despite this, he continued to do well academically. By the time he was in eighth grade, his junior-high math teacher recommended he enroll in an algebra class at Columbine High School. Dylan refused to go. All three of us met with his teacher to weigh the pros and cons. It’s intimidating enough to start high school as a ninth grader, let alone to go there a year early, and the logistics of getting him back and forth safely were complicated. Together we concluded it would be best to let Dylan stay at the junior high for math.
It was a relief to us that Dylan was doing well, because Byron’s entry into adolescence had been challenging. He needed a great deal of parental poking and prodding to get through his daily routines. We’d established clear expectations for the boys when they were young. They were never permitted to speak to us, or to any adult, in a disrespectful way. We asked them to care for their rooms and belongings, and to help us with projects around the house. I expected them to do what they could to stay safe: wear sunscreen, drive responsibly, and say no to drugs. On top of that, they were required to keep up with their schoolwork, and so when Tom and I saw Byron’s high school academic performance (never stellar) decline, we searched his room and discovered he was smoking marijuana.
Marijuana is legal in Colorado now, so our reaction might seemed old-fashioned and outsized, but drugs had never been a part of either of our lives, and we were frankly afraid of them. We’d been pretty closely monitoring Byron’s movements before, but after we found the pot, we got right up on top of him. We searched his room as a matter of routine. We insisted he end friendships we believed weren’t in his best interests. We sent him to see a counselor.
I’m sure we annoyed him beyond measure, but Byron had the same good-natured, loving spirit as always. He was funny and open, and I’d spend hours in his room talking to him, making sure he was okay. There wasn’t a lot of conflict in the house, but Byron was definitely receiving the lion’s share of our parental attention, which may have meant we did not recognize the intensity of Dylan’s emerging needs.
During those trying years, Dylan kept doing what he was supposed to be doing. He seemed to enjoy the role of the cooperative, responsible child, the kid who did the right thing, and Tom and I needed him to fulfill that role more than ever when we were preoccupied with Byron’s welfare. Dylan’s commitment to self-reliance obscured how much he needed help at the end of his life. It unquestionably contributed to our inability to see him as troubled.
In the summer after eighth grade, Dylan began to develop the lean, angular look he’d have for the rest of his life. We wanted to reward his transition into high school, so we offered to send him to a summer camp in the mountains. The camp was rustic, and the kids shouldered the majority of what needed to be done to keep the place running. Dylan never hesitated to complain at home when he felt he’d been assigned more than his fair share of chores, but he had no complaints about camp. He loved being outdoors, and the counselors told us he got along well with the other kids.
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Both of our sons played baseball from the time they were small; the sport was the common thread woven through their childhoods and adolescence. They watched games on television, fought over the sports pages, and took turns going to baseball games with their father. Tom loved the game, and the three of them would spend summer nights playing catch in the backyard, or throwing balls through a plywood sheet Tom had customized for pitching practice. Dylan’s walls were covered with posters of his baseball heroes: Lou Gehrig, Roger Clemens, Randy Johnson. One of our favorite movies was The Natural, which starred Robert Redford as a baseball prodigy. The boys watched it so often that they knew parts by heart.
Baseball was not only a wholesome pastime for the boys; it was a shared love between Tom’s family and my own. One of my grandfathers had been asked to join a professional team as a young man (he declined: he didn’t want to leave his widowed mother), and both Tom’s father and his brother played amateur ball well into their adult years. I loved that our boys played this classic American sport, just as their grandfathers and great-grandfathers had before them. Both Dylan and Tom were devastated when Dylan, entering Columbine High School as a ninth grader, didn’t make the Columbine High School baseball team.
Byron’s smooth right-handed pitch kept him in the game until he grew tired of it. Dylan also pitched, but he was a lefty and fired the ball like a cannon, trying to strike the batter out. Throwing hard was his trademark, and he often sacrificed accuracy for speed. In time, his pitching style took its toll on his arm. The summer before Dylan went into eighth grade, Tom hired a coach to help both boys with their form. During one of their sessions, Dylan seemed to be struggling. Suddenly, he stopped throwing altogether, his eyes downcast. Tom hurried over, worried he or the coach had pushed Dylan too hard. He saw Dylan’s eyes were filled with tears.
“My arm hurts too much to pitch,” Dylan told his dad.
Tom was shocked. Dylan had never mentioned any pain before, though we later learned it had been going on for months, worsening with each throw. It was typical of Dylan not to mention it: he’d been determined to overcome the problem by force of will. Tom took him to the doctor immediately. Dylan had a painful inflammation around the tendons of the elbow, and the doctor recommended he take a break from baseball. He stayed away until the following summer, when he began to practice for the Columbine High School baseball team tryouts.