A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy(38)
Just days after the shootings, our lawyer handed us a cardboard box containing a hand-painted ceramic angel, a frozen dinner of creamed chicken and biscuits, and a few condolence cards—all gestures of sympathy from people we had never met. That trickle of consideration turned into a stream, and then a flood. People wrote from all over the country, and the world. All they needed was our name and “Littleton, CO” on the envelope, and their words and gifts found their way to us.
A lot of the mail came from people Tom and I had known at various times in our lives: elementary school classmates, teachers, coworkers, and former students. Some were from families in the area whose kids had known Dylan, sharing their memories of him. I read those many times. Lots of the letters were from strangers, though, and a great many of them were anonymous. We received prayers, poems, books, plaques, toys, children’s drawings, and handmade objects. People made charitable donations in Dylan’s memory. They sent cash and checks, which we returned.
People from all walks of life wrote to us: clergymen, attorneys, teachers, social workers, policemen, United States Marines, and prisoners. The generosity was astonishing. People offered legal services, confidential talks, massages, and private cabins where we could hide from the press.
A great many people wrote to tell us they were dismayed to see local memorials held for thirteen and not fifteen victims. They wrote to let me know their own religious organizations or social groups had remembered all fifteen—at concerts where Dylan’s name had been read out with the names of the other victims, or masses where prayers had been said for his soul. I was grateful for those letters. For me, there had been fifteen victims. Although I understood the response in my own community, it was still hard for me to accept that Dylan’s entire life had no value at all because of what he had done before he died.
It had been reported extensively in the media that Dylan and Eric had been bullied, and so we received letters from people of all ages who had been bullied in high school. I did not know Dylan had been bullied, and the shock of needing to readjust my image of him was extreme. Regardless, I was moved by the letter writers’ descriptions of the blind rage, depression, and helplessness that result from feeling so powerless. “I’m not surprised it happened. I’m surprised it didn’t happen at my school, too, and that it doesn’t happen every day at schools across America,” one young man wrote, after sharing his own high school experiences of being afraid to go to the bathroom or walk the halls. Young people wrote directly to Dylan, pouring out their sorrow and hatred for their own school culture, and I wondered if anyone around them knew of the grief they were carrying inside.
Many of the people who wrote shared personal experiences of loss. Some wrote about their own family’s experience with mental illness and suicide. Those letters helped me tremendously, as did the ones where parents and grandparents shared stories about hardship and humiliation caused by a family member.
A minister wrote to share that his son was serving a life sentence for murder. I read that letter often. One of the (many) things I felt guilt about in the wake of the tragedy was my fear that I had failed to impart a proper religious education. I had taught Dylan right from wrong every minute of the day, but we hadn’t regularly attended a church or a synagogue since the boys were small. It was silly—a single example was no kind of sample size—yet I took great comfort from knowing that in this one instance, at least, regular Sunday school hadn’t been enough to stop a child from making a terrible choice.
Our lawyer assigned a member of his staff to go through and remove any hate mail or death threats. Despite his efforts to shield us, we did receive hate mail. And one negative letter obliterated the positive effects of hundreds of supportive ones.
One letter writer demanded in black marker: “HOW COULD YOU NOT KNOW??!”
It was, of course, the question I asked myself day and night. I had not imagined myself to be a perfect parent, by any stretch of the imagination. I did, however, believe my close connection (and not just to Dylan, but to both of my sons) meant I would be able to intuit if something was wrong, especially if something was very wrong. I would never have told you I had access to Dylan’s every thought and feeling, but I would have said, with confidence, that I knew exactly what he was capable of. And I would have been wrong.
“There but for the grace of God, go I,” one mother wrote. She was living with a violent, mentally ill child, and described eloquently how she woke up every day dreading a phone call bearing terrible news about her son, like the one I had received from Tom. It was a sentiment many others would echo over the years. One letter offered prayers of support, and was signed From a Death Row Mom.
We received a few letters from the families of victims of other shootings. One man’s son was killed in junior high school, and he eloquently shared his initial feelings of outrage, pain, and numbness. That letter gave me a little insight into what the victims’ families might be suffering. People wrote who had lost a child, like the young mother whose toddler suffered a fatal head injury when she fell within reach of family members. Those letters enabled me to connect to the part of me that was simply grieving Dylan. Of course, we heard from many people who had lost loved ones to suicide. I couldn’t yet fully understand Dylan’s death as a suicide, but those letters helped me to begin. I would later have the opportunity to meet many of the people who wrote.
Though we were isolated from our local community in many ways, these letters helped me to feel kinship with others on a global scale. Many more people than I’d ever imagined had experienced extreme hardships and loss. There was a devastating amount of pain out there in the world. It was as if we had tapped in to a deep wellspring of universal suffering. I wondered daily at people’s compassion, and at their generosity. One card read simply, “God Bless Your Family,” in the painstaking and shaky handwriting of a very elderly person, and I marveled at the enormous and possibly painful effort a stranger across the country had made—to get the card and the stamp, to write the note, to mail it—just so I would not feel so alone. These were people with an emotional bandwidth, a depth and breadth of understanding, that had come from pain in their own lives.