A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy(39)
Unfortunately, it was still too early for me to take comfort from the stories of their survival. I still did not believe there would be an “after.”
Like so many things that happened to us after the shootings, there was no way to respond normally to the mail we were getting. I responded personally to the first notes, and intended to continue, but the boxes of mail came, and came, and came. My grandfather had once written a thank-you note in response to a particularly beautiful thank-you note he’d received, so this failure to acknowledge the generosity of people who’d reached out landed hard with me. I hated the idea that people who had taken the time and made the effort to express sympathy would go without thanks, but I simply couldn’t keep up.
I stacked the letters around us, filling plastic bins to sort and organize them, until they took over our family room. I developed a triage system to prioritize those requiring a personal response, with people who had shared their own despair and suicidal thoughts at the top. I responded to many of the letters, but it was only a small percentage. I stopped counting cards and letters when they reached 3,600, and they continued to arrive long after I was no longer counting.
My guilt was amplified by the scathing criticism we were receiving from every quarter. We were pilloried daily in the press, often for decisions I didn’t even fully understand. For example, our attorneys advised us to file our intent to put the sheriff’s department on notice, a routine legal strategy to keep our options open if new information about the case became available. Through it all, we would maintain a positive working relationship with the sheriff’s department, continuing to communicate and eager to help in any way we could. But the stories in the media came quickly after the decision, and made it seem as if we were going to sue the sheriff’s department for what our son had done. News stories like this one drew an astonishing amount of vitriol. “Those parents are disgusting,” one person seethed on a talk radio broadcast I accidentally heard while changing radio stations in my car. People thought we should be jailed, hunted like animals, tortured, shot. I still can’t look at comment sections of articles about Columbine.
I was never able to escape the humiliation and fear that such remarks left behind. I’d always thought of myself as a good citizen and a good mother, and now I was being paraded through town as the worst parent who’d ever lived. For the first time in my life, I was living as an outcast, judged and rejected by others for circumstances over which I had no control. Dylan had unwittingly provided an opportunity for us to understand how he must have felt during the last years of his life.
We lived in a small psychological space following Dylan’s death: one in which we were still attentive, well-meaning, loving parents who had lost our son. The only way we could survive was by minimizing our exposure to the negativity, and so we withdrew. Every time someone attempted to speak on our behalf, their words were twisted and misrepresented in the media. So we surrounded ourselves with friends and locked ourselves away from the rest of the world. We did not respond to even the most egregious accusations.
I am not sure refusing to engage was the best strategy. Our failure to speak up in our own defense made people believe we were hiding secrets. It felt, and still feels, wrong to let untruths stand—especially since many of the misconceptions about our family and how we raised Dylan are perceived to be true to this day.
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I’m tired of being strong. I can’t be strong any more. I can’t face or do anything. I’m lost in a deep chasm of sorrow. I have 17 phone messages and don’t have the energy to listen to them. Dylan’s room is just as the law enforcement people left it, and I can’t face putting it in order.
—Journal entry, May 1999
During our first days back at home, we had made disjointed efforts to reclaim the house, but Dylan’s room remained as the police had left it, with his possessions spilling out onto the mezzanine, and his stripped mattress leaning against the upstairs banister.
In the month after his death, I began to make daily forays into the room, putting a few things in order before the strength of my feelings overwhelmed me and I had to flee. I lingered in particular over Dylan’s bathroom sink. Wisps of his blond hair remained in his comb, and his whiskers filled an electric razor we’d bought him.
It wasn’t only the strength of my grief that held me back from doing more. Every time I disinfected a surface or laundered a hamper of dirty clothes, I was destroying traces Dylan had left behind. The idea of erasing him broke my heart, and I worried that with every emptied wastebasket I was losing opportunities to understand the last hours of his life. Of course, the investigators had taken everything they thought might be relevant, but I was still searching for answers in the wreckage left behind.
I was no closer to understanding what he had been thinking and feeling, or how the kid I loved and raised could have participated in an atrocity like this. What could possibly explain his state of mind? Had there been drugs in his system, undetected by the autopsy? Had there been outside influences? Organized crime, perhaps? Even if Eric had masterminded a plan and urged Dylan to participate, Dylan was a smart kid. He could have found a way to get himself out of it if he wanted to. Why hadn’t he? Had Eric coerced or threatened him? Had Dylan been brainwashed? At one point, Byron asked seriously if Dylan could have been possessed. A month before, I would have laughed out loud at such a ridiculous idea, but in our new reality, demonic possession seemed as plausible an answer as any.