A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy(33)

—Journal entry, May 1999





Ever since childhood, I have found comfort in being helpful.

My grandfather threw huge picnics at the farm he owned for the people who worked at his company and for the charities he supported, and I made myself useful by rounding up paper plates and empties. At school, I preferred to help the lunch ladies clean the cafeteria than to go out to the playground at recess. I’m still like this. “Put me to work,” I say at a wedding, and I keep saying it until the host hands me something to pass or to pour.

But there was absolutely nothing I could do to help anyone else in the aftershock of the carnage and cruelty committed by my son at Columbine High School.

Concerned friends and clergy wanted to bring the families together, but the first lawsuit had been filed days after the tragedy, and our attorneys rejected the idea of face-to-face meetings outright. I can’t imagine anyone involved would have wanted to meet with me so soon after the shootings, either.

People urged Tom and me to make a public statement through the media. We did a few days after the tragedy, apologizing as well as expressing our bewilderment and grief. Even so, I felt compelled to communicate directly with the families of Dylan’s victims, and to the victims who had survived. I decided to handwrite letters of apology to each of the families.

I wasn’t foolish enough to believe there were any words that could ever suffice. But I needed to let the families know the depth of my sorrow for what they had suffered at my son’s hand. I had the idea that if I could extend some kindness, it might counterbalance Dylan’s cruelty on that horrific morning. And, although there’s nothing noble about it, I wanted them to know that although I had loved him, I was not my son.

Writing those letters remains one of the hardest things I have ever done. It took me a full month to finish them. How could I convey empathy, when even hearing my name would likely increase the suffering these families were feeling? How could I reach out, as a companion in sorrow, when my son—the person I had created and loved more than life—was the reason they were in agony? How do you say, “I’m sorry my child killed yours”?

The difficulty of writing the letters was compounded by the conflict it created within our own family. Tom was against the idea. He worried that sending an apology would be tantamount to accepting personal responsibility. Learning about the victims and how they died was excruciating for him, and he avoided it.

I felt differently. If hearing from me might bring some small measure of comfort and open the door for communication with the families, it was a chance I wanted to take. I had to do something. I hoped showing my own humanity might bring an iota of peace to people who would be forever tormented by the cruelty of what my son had done.

I had been deliberately avoiding news coverage, but in order to write to the families, I needed to know more about their loved ones. So I forced myself to read newspaper articles for information about the teacher and each of the children who had been killed. I never, ever wanted to dehumanize the individuals who had been killed or injured by thinking of them as a collective group—the “victims.” In each case, I needed to know the particular, specific treasure that had been lost.

Sorrow piled on sorrow with every biographical detail I read. Learning what each person had been interested in and what their friends and loved ones said about them broke my heart. The waste of it, the idea that Dylan had robbed innocent people of their precious lives, and of the futures they should have had, was intolerable. How could he have inflicted such pain? How could anyone, raised in our home, have done this?

At times, writing the letters felt like standing dangerously close to a fire, and sometimes I had to step back. Each day, I wanted to run as fast as I could from the task in front of me. But if I did, I knew I would lose my connection to what had happened. Columbine had already become the lightning rod it still is, a symbol in a single word for the hazards of bullying, mental illness, irresponsible parenting, guns. Like everyone else, I believed there were answers to be pursued, but I was not yet ready to take refuge in abstractions. Columbine wasn’t “about” guns or bullying; it was about the fifteen people who were now dead, and the twenty-four who had been injured, some profoundly.

Yet even while I was trying to write coherent letters acknowledging my son’s responsibility, I was clinging ferociously to my denial that Dylan could have been responsible for killing anyone. As I wrote them, I believed with all my heart that the people who sustained mortal wounds had been shot by Eric, not by Dylan. In the letters, I referred to the “role” Dylan played in the tragedy because I still didn’t know what had really happened that day, only that people had been killed and wounded. I referred to a “moment of madness,” because I believed Dylan had to have acted on impulse; it was inconceivable his participation could have been planned ahead of time. I could not yet believe my son was a murderer, because I did not accept that his intent had been to kill.

I feared that many of the families would be insulted by my presumption in reaching out. They would say—correctly—that I did not have the right even to utter their loved one’s name. When I read the first drafts of the letters I had written, I almost threw them away. The words on the paper were shamefully, pitifully inadequate.

But writing them was all that I could think of to do. I could not undo what Dylan and Eric had done. I could not bring back the lives that had been lost, nor heal those who had been wounded physically or psychologically. I was powerless to dampen the aftershocks of the tragedy for myself or anyone else, and I understood I could not control how people would respond. I was not asking for forgiveness, or for understanding, or for anything, except the chance to say that I was sorry.