A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy(37)

Tom was looking for an explanation: bullies, the school, the media, Eric. None of that made sense to me. Although I was still maintaining some level of denial about the degree to which Dylan had been involved, it was easier for me to believe he had been crazy—or even evil—than to pretend anything he’d experienced could justify what he’d done.

While I took comfort from our visitors, Tom found it easier to be alone. It seemed to me that he wanted to control the lawyers working with us, whereas I was painfully aware we were out of our depth and felt grateful when a professional with expertise could tell us what to do.

Our marriage had been successful for almost thirty years because we complemented each other. But after Columbine, we couldn’t seem to agree about anything. We were both riding the same roller coaster, but we were never in the same place at the same time. If Tom was sad, I was angry. If I was angry, he was sad. I’d always been able to brush off Tom’s cranky moods, and to laugh at his colorful rants. When you’re grieving in such an extreme way, though, your tolerance for stress is diminished. It was like the skin had been flayed right off me, leaving no layer of protection between me and overwhelming emotion. In my journal, I wrote:

Tom’s words sound like a jackhammer to me, even those uttered most quietly. His thoughts are never aligned with mine. They always come from far away, and they’re totally foreign to my thinking.



Our relationship with Byron was strained, too. He’d moved back home several weeks after his brother’s death. By that time, he’d lived in his own apartment for two years and had grown used to being independent. Tom and I couldn’t stop wringing our hands and prying into his personal life; we thought our failure to pry into Dylan’s had caused Columbine. But we were barely rational, a point brought home to us one night when Byron went out to dinner with a friend.

The weather was bad, and Tom and I couldn’t sleep for worrying about the treacherous conditions on the winding roads leading up to our house. We finally heard Byron’s car pull into our drive around eleven, but he didn’t come into the house as we expected. Instead, we heard strange clinking sounds from our garage, and then his car pulled out again at top speed.

We panicked. Our heads were filled with worst-case scenarios: weapons, drugs, suicide, theft, murder. Had Byron come home for a hidden gun or other contraband? Had he stashed illegal materials in our garage? Should we call the police?

Twenty minutes later, over the sound of our pounding hearts, we heard Byron’s car pull in at a more leisurely speed. He was badly startled to find the two of us, wild-eyed in our pajamas, waiting for him at the top of the stairs. The proverbial hooves we’d heard had been a horse, not a zebra: on his way home, Byron had passed a car that had skidded off the slick road. He’d come home to get a chain from the garage so he could help the other driver out of the ditch.

After that night, I extracted a promise from him that he would never intentionally hurt himself or anyone else. I was surprised to find he needed the same reassurance from me. We were beginning to fall into the complicated pattern that would define our relationship in the years after the shootings, even as we became closer than we’d ever been. I’d encourage him to talk about his feelings, but when he confessed to despair (rational, under the circumstances), I worried he’d harm himself. It was a terribly unfair position to put him in. I was asking him to reassure me he was okay—really, I was asking him to be okay—when of course he was not. It would take us a long time to find a way to talk about our devastation while assuring one another we were still committed to life.

In reality, I am not sure we were. On many days, dying seemed easier than living. All three of us talked about death, ashes, epitaphs, the meaning of life. Tom said he knew what his last words would be: “Thank God it’s over.”

? ? ?

I read mail for five hours, crying nearly the whole time. Two boxes now, one from the post office and one from the lawyer. So many cards and letters of love and support, and yet one hate letter and I am shattered.

—Journal entry, May 1999



Much has been written about the need most people have, in the aftermath of a tragedy like Columbine, to assign blame. Whether it was the scale of the tragedy, or the senselessness, or a thousand other reasons I can think of, Columbine became—and remains—a lightning rod. People blamed video games, movies, music, bullying, access to guns, unarmed teachers, the absence of prayer in schools, secular humanism, psychiatric medication. Mostly, though, they blamed us.

To me, that made sense. If I had been sitting in my living room, shaking out the pages of the freshly delivered Rocky Mountain News with Dylan bagging up the kitchen garbage behind me and Byron happily and untidily ensconced in his apartment across town, I would have blamed us too.

Didn’t I wonder about a criminal’s family whenever I heard about a terrible act of violence? Didn’t I think, What on earth did the parents do to that poor child so he could grow up to do something like that? A child raised with love, in a loving home, could never have done such a thing. For years, and without a second thought, I’d accepted explanations laying the blame squarely with the criminal’s family. Obviously, the parents had been oblivious, irresponsible, secretly abusive. Of course the mother had been a shrew, a smotherer, a doormat.

That was why I was so surprised when people we’d never met began to reach out to our family, in sympathy both for our loss and for our predicament. It is also why I have such esteem and appreciation for the victims’ families who reached out without blame. They cannot know, as I do, what it is to be the mother of a killer, yet they are able to operate from a place of compassion. That is remarkable to me. It is something I am not sure I would have been able to do.