A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy(35)

In order to cope with our grief, and to piece together what had been going on in Dylan’s mind, we needed to talk with people who’d known him, but I had no desire to put any of our friends in a position where they might be forced to testify in a trial. (We were not supposed to talk about anything with legal significance, but everything had legal significance.) I’m naturally forthcoming, and was used to sharing my thoughts freely with the people I cared about. Our lawyer told me I could talk about my own feelings, and so I did. The people around me were kind enough to listen, even when I told the same stories over and over again.

All I could do was take and not give back. I had never needed the kindness of others more than I did at that time, and I never did a poorer job of expressing my gratitude. This feeling added to my pervasive sense of guilt. My short-term memory had disappeared. I couldn’t remember whom I’d thanked, or if I’d said anything at all to express my appreciation. I kept a notebook to help me remember what I had said and done, but I’m still convinced I failed to convey my gratitude to everyone who deserved it.

By the end of our first week back home, we knew we couldn’t leave Littleton. The people who knew Dylan before—who remembered the day he pitched a victorious no-hitter, who could laugh about the time he ate an entire bucket of KFC by himself, or who’d been put into stitches by one of his dry asides—they were there, too, willing to share their memories of him. How would we survive without them?

Besides, could we ever truly run from this? There would never be a way to escape from the horror of what Dylan had done. No mere relocation could distance us from the truth, or from its stain. No matter where we went, this horror would follow.

? ? ?

Wandering around the house alone trying to function.

—Journal entry, April 1999



In the early 1970s, I worked as an art therapist at a psychiatric hospital in Milwaukee. One day I overheard Betty, one of our patients with schizophrenia, say, “I’m just sick and tired of following my face around.” In the weeks and months after Columbine, Betty’s phrase came often to my mind. As my state of shock began to lift incrementally, waves of negative emotions overwhelmed me, and I toggled among debilitating sorrow, fear, anger, humiliation, anxiety, remorse, grief, powerlessness, pain, and hopelessness.

The feelings weren’t new; they’d been my constant companions since I’d gotten that first message at my office from Tom. Whatever protective shield had minimized their impact in the earliest hours was becoming ever less efficient, though. As more days passed, the insulation keeping me from fully experiencing the reality of what Dylan had done began to fall away, and my emotions, when they came, were searing. I could no longer distance myself from the community’s pain, or pretend my son hadn’t caused this agony. Seeing a photograph of a victim’s funeral on the cover of the local paper would leave me unable to move under the crushing weight of my grief and regret. I could barely function.

I had always been hyper-organized and efficient, the kind of person who loves nothing better than sailing through her daily to-do list. In the weeks following Columbine, if I got a single thing done in the course of a day—the dishwasher emptied, a bill paid—it was a good day. I couldn’t yet go back to work, but my career in disability services had at least provided me with a context. The symptoms of intense grief—memory loss, attention deficit, emotional fragility, incapacitating fatigue—are surprisingly similar to those resulting from traumatic brain injury.

Some days, I worried I was losing my link to sanity. One morning, I sat on the edge of the bed trying to get dressed. I put one sock on, then stared into space for an hour before I could put on the other. It took me almost four hours to get dressed. Another afternoon, a friend called to see how I was doing. “I do nothing. Why am I so tired?” I asked, genuinely bewildered. She spoke from her own experience with loss: “You’re not doing nothing. You’re grieving, and it’s hard work.” My grief for Dylan was at the heart of everything. It would have been crushing under any circumstances, but it was further compounded by my lack of comprehension, and by my feelings of guilt over the destruction he had wrought. My world had been rocked off its axis.

Friends who knew I often turned to art in times of trouble brought me art books and new sketchbooks to tempt me, but it was impossible for me to open them. Wearing bright colors made me feel physically ill. A life once filled with work and family activities and house maintenance and art and friends had come to a screeching halt. The long evening walks I took with our neighbors in the cliffs surrounding our home provided my only relief.

At the beginning of May, the school decided Dylan’s closest circle of friends would not be allowed to attend their own graduation ceremony, scheduled for the end of the month.

At first, the unfairness of the decision aroused a real anger in me, and a sense of protectiveness for Dylan’s friends. They were good kids and they were hurting, too. Most of them had reached out to us to offer their support, and to tell us they’d been as blindsided as we had been. A number of them had come over to our house, bearing photographs and videos of Dyl, and cards he’d given them. Zack’s girlfriend, Devon, made a book for us of photographs and written memories, mounted on paper she’d made herself. There was Dylan—grinning while pushing Zack’s dad into the pool; sporting a Hawaiian shirt and a bunch of leis at a costume party Devon had thrown; clowning around with Zack and making a hokey thumbs-up sign for the camera. I spent hours poring over these artifacts, desperate for confirmation that the sensitive, fun-loving kid Tom and I remembered had been real.