A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy(34)
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Read today that Mr. Rohrbough had destroyed Dylan and Eric’s crosses. I don’t blame him at all. No one should expect the grieving families of victims to embrace Dylan and Eric now. I’d feel the same way.
—Journal entry, May 1999
A week after the shootings, my brother, Phil, came to spend a few days with us. My sister couldn’t join him: one of her teenage children, Dylan’s cousin, had been so traumatized by the news of Dylan’s role that she needed medical attention.
Phil had come to comfort us, but what could he say or do? We were shadow people, ghosts of ourselves, moving through a never-ending twilight characterized by discombobulation, shame, and sorrow. Our days were consumed with legal appointments and the paranoid measures we followed in order to avoid the media and those who might want to harm us.
Dylan’s face was everywhere: Murderer. Terrorist. Neo-Nazi. Outcast. Scum.
Soon after the shootings, we received yet another terrible shock. It was reported that Robyn, Dylan’s prom date, had bought three guns for the boys.
My first thought was, Oh, no. Poor Robyn. In a flash, I could see it: she had done it because they’d asked her to, because she liked them, because she was a nice person. She would never, ever, ever have done it if she’d believed it was unsafe. She’s going to have to live with this for the rest of her life, I thought. Then, for the thousandth time: Look how many people they’ve hurt.
The aftershocks kept coming. Still mostly insulated from news and the outside world, I was only dimly aware of most of them. I didn’t know until a year later that Marilyn Manson had canceled concert dates in our area out of respect, or that the NRA did not cancel their annual meeting, held at a hotel fifteen miles away from the school, just ten days after the shootings.
I did learn that school authorities and police had been told about Eric’s website, the one Judy Brown had told me about on the terrible day of the shootings, and that he’d talked openly on the site about pipe bombs and killing people.
And I saw Dylan on the cover of Time magazine, next to the headline “The Monsters Next Door.” Despite the monstrous nature of what he had done, it hurt me terribly to see that word used to describe him and utterly surreal to see his face under the iconic logo. It was still hard to believe Dylan had done something horrendous enough that the neighbors would know about it, let alone the entire world.
I read the article. The next day, I wrote:
Depression really kicked in when I read the Time Magazine article yesterday. They made Dylan sound human, like a nice kid gone astray. This hurts more than the villain portrayal because it shows how totally senseless it all was. He didn’t have to do any of this. He was so close to a life away from high school. If he was depressed, he didn’t show us.
A makeshift memorial had been erected in town, consisting of fifteen rough-hewn wooden crosses, one for each person who had died, including Dylan and Eric. Immediately, Dylan’s and Eric’s crosses were chopped down and thrown in a dumpster. A church group planted fifteen commemorative trees in a circle on their property, and police and congregation members stood helplessly by while two were felled.
Of course, I understood why people did not want Dylan and Eric to be mourned or memorialized, but this unchallenged display of anger frightened us. Within a few days of his arrival, my brother accepted an offer to sleep at a neighbor’s house. He urged us to leave with him. “You’re in such a state of shock, you can’t see how dangerous this is.”
We were in shock, but the bigger issue was that we just didn’t care. One particularly bad night, Tom said wearily, “I wish he’d killed us, too.” It was a thought we would have on many occasions over the years.
A reporter got ahold of our phone records and called everyone we’d communicated with over the previous months. Our friends and family members were already inundated, but now the press started showing up at the two apartment buildings we owned to question our tenants. We’d worked hard to build a family business, and the safety and comfort of our tenants was a priority, but they were being harassed simply because they’d had the misfortune of moving into one of our properties. We didn’t see a way to protect them, so we moved forward to sell the buildings.
We considered leaving the area, but as hostile as the larger world was toward us, our own inner circle became an invaluable source of support. For more than a decade, our lives had been in Littleton, and the people we loved rallied immediately to our side. On days when I wasn’t sure I would survive, friends materialized to keep me going.
If God sends us love on earth, I truly believe it is delivered through the actions of people. During that terrible time, we were sustained by the care of those around us. Friends and family members were stalwart with daily calls and hugs. Neighbors delivered home-cooked meals and returned empty serving dishes to their rightful owners. Our friends quickly learned to stop defending us in the press after so many of them saw their words distorted or put into a negative context, but they fiercely protected our property, not only from the media’s intrusions, but from any stranger who appeared. In the early days, when our phone rang off the hook with interview requests and calls from strangers as well as friends—twenty or thirty calls a day—our closest neighbors bought us a caller ID device so we’d know when it was safe to pick up. After that, we screened every call.
On Mother’s Day after the shootings, a friend who is a talented gardener scoured the bargain section at a local nursery. When I returned home, I was greeted by a profusion of spring color from the neglected pots on my porch: verbena, petunias, dianthus, lobelia, marigolds. It was a gift of beauty, and of herself, and it provided me with the surprising news that I could still appreciate such a thing.