A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy(36)
Upon reflection, my anger about graduation abated, and a grim resignation took its place. Who was I to be angry, even on someone else’s behalf? These were extraordinary circumstances. There was no manual for how to proceed in the wake of the worst school shooting in history.
Afterward, Dylan’s friends scattered like beads from a broken necklace. Not surprisingly, many of them suffered serious difficulties for years. Nate stopped by our house on his way out of town. He asked for an item to remember his friend by, a request that moved me, and I was happy to see him choose a pair of Dylan’s sunglasses—they reminded us both of Dylan, in happier times.
But Nate had something to tell us, too. He’d seen Dylan give a large wad of money to a guy they worked with at Blackjack Pizza. When Nate pressed him, Dylan told him the money was for a gun.
We were dumbfounded by this news. Even Tom was willing to finally express anger toward Dylan for lying to us. We had been clinging to the belief that Dylan was an innocent victim, ensnared by Eric at the last minute—and yet here was evidence that he had taken an active role in buying a gun, more evidence that my son had not been the person I thought he was.
A month after the shootings, I sent the letters I had written to the families of the people who had been killed. Our lawyer watched the news for a response. (I still couldn’t turn on the television.) As we had expected, the families’ reactions were wildly diverse. Some appreciated the effort. Others were angry; at least one of the families tore my letter up, unread. There was no single point of view. In the weeks and months and years to come, when an individual or family acted aggressively, it helped me to remember they did not necessarily represent all the families involved.
I received two written responses from victims’ families in the months that followed. One letter was from the teenaged sibling of one of the murdered girls. She said she did not blame us for the tragedy, and I wept with sadness and joy. Then, on my birthday eleven months later, we received a letter from the father of one of the boys who was killed in the school library. He reached out with compassion and said he wished he could help us in some way. The letter felt like a gift from heaven. We got permission from our lawyer to write back, but we did not meet for several years because of the many lawsuits against our family.
The small sense of accomplishment I’d gained from sending the letters to the victims’ families was short-lived. There were far more losses than the thirteen who had been killed. I felt I also needed to write to the twenty-four others who had been injured. There were students who would never walk again, and those who would live in constant pain. After years of working with students living with disabilities, I had an idea of the hardships the injured students and their families would have to endure. I thought of the physical and psychological agony they must be experiencing, and the ongoing drain on financial resources. Some would have to adjust to new identities that would affect every aspect of their lives. Even if we were held financially responsible, there was not enough money in the world to relieve the suffering Dylan had caused.
The second set of letters—to the families of surviving victims—took many more weeks for me to write than the first. Again, I was struck by the inadequacy of my message, and by the flimsiness of mere words in the face of everything that had been lost. How dare I interject myself into their lives? But I felt I had to do something.
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I’m sick of waking up each day with a broken heart, of missing Dylan and wanting to scream loud enough to wake up from the nightmare my life has become. I want to hold Dylan in my arms again, to cuddle him as I did years ago, to hold him in my lap and help him with his shoes or a puzzle. I want to talk to him, and stop him from even considering this horrible act.
—Journal entry, May 11, 1999
There is a scene at the end of the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indiana Jones is tied, back to back, to the heroine of the movie. They can do nothing but close their eyes as vicious flying spirits unleash a storm of destruction around them. Tom and I were similarly tied to each other, utterly exposed and unable to escape, and we did not know if there would be anything left of our lives when the hurricane passed. Our grief only increased with each revelation about Dylan.
Immediately after the shootings, we went to one of the therapists recommended in a letter from the county coroner. Tom and Byron went a few times but soon came to the conclusion that the sessions weren’t helping. I stayed with it longer, though the therapist and I were barely scratching the surface of my pain. He seemed overwhelmed by our situation, and by the magnitude of what we were dealing with. He read the papers, watched the news, and surfed the Internet to gauge the world’s reaction. When I walked into a counseling session, he would swivel away from his computer and allude to the threats made against us in the press or online. I was trying to insulate myself from that kind of fear and negativity, so these reports made me anxious. I’m sure the therapist was simply concerned about our safety, but at times he seemed considerably more preoccupied with the external factors around us than with my emotional state.
We did a few exercises to deal with grief, such as writing letters to Dylan, but Tom and I could not begin the hard work of facing the loss of a child. How could we? We were swept away by the madness engulfing us. Our grief for Dylan was buried under the difficulties of living with the life he had created for us.
It was becoming increasingly clear, too, that Tom and I were going in different directions with our pain. Tom’s a born entrepreneur with none of my innate caution, always happy to dig into a new project without stopping to worry about how difficult or expensive it will be to complete. I’d fallen in love with his creativity, and had been enthralled by his risk-taking and lack of fear. We had always been strongly attracted to each other, and we shared the same sense of humor. Who you are dictates how you proceed through the grief process, though, and the extremity of the situation we were in began to highlight how different Tom and I really were.