A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy(41)

Among other things, Cindy’s letter validated for us how a child’s personal devastation could go undetected by the most watchful parents, teachers, and peers if they chose to keep it concealed. I had been a teacher at the college level for most of my career, and knew well that young adults snuck around, hiding six-packs of beer and furtive smooches in the parking lot. Still, I would not have thought it possible for a kid to hide an event as earthshaking as rape, or thoughts and feelings as serious as suicidal ideation, especially from parents like the Worths. Each day brought a new shock to illuminate how painfully naive—and dangerous—this belief of mine had been.

More than anything, Cindy’s letter made me long to talk with Dylan. A running dialogue with him played in my head like background music in a constant, exhausting loop. In the earliest days at Ruth and Don’s house, my doctor had written me a prescription for anti-anxiety medication. I took it only once. The tamping down of my anxiety sent my grief surging full-force to the surface. I was unable to stop crying, as if a tap had gotten stuck in the “on” position. After that, I had decided to live with my emotions without medication.

There was no point, I was beginning to realize, in trying to avoid or outrun the confusion or the grief. The best I could do was simply try to survive it—and, in the months and years to come, to do everything in my power to understand all the things I had not known about my son.





CHAPTER 8


A Place of Sorrow


This library had been a place for innocent children, a place where they should have been safe, and now they were all dead.

—Journal entry, June 1999





In early June of 1999, we read in the newspaper that family members of the victims were being invited to visit the school library, where many of their children had died, before renovations gutted the room.

I knew Dylan could never be considered a victim of Columbine, and we understood why we had not been contacted. Yet we needed to see the place where Dylan had taken his own life, and the lives of so many others. Our lawyer spoke to the sheriff’s department and arranged a visit. We had been living more or less in hiding since the shootings, so we met the lawyers in the parking lot of a hardware store in order to switch cars. The cloak-and-dagger routine, for once, did not feel absurd.

The school was still a crime scene. As soon as I saw the yellow tape, my heart thundered in my chest. As we walked through the corridors, we saw construction workers repairing the damage Dylan and Eric had caused. Patches of black soot on the carpets, walls, and ceilings showed where they had tossed small explosives as they walked through the school. Ceiling tiles had been removed, and sections of the carpets. Sheets of clear plastic covered shattered windows. Not for the first or last time, I was dumbfounded by the magnitude of the damage my son had caused. Workers looked down at us from ladders, and I wondered if they knew who we were.

The library door was locked, covered with a sheet of plastic, and swathed in yellow police tape. Before we entered, the sheriff’s department told us we were there to see where our son had died, and that was all. I felt grateful for the professionalism of the police, and for the respect they showed to all the victims.

I was trembling when we entered. Always looking for answers, I wanted to believe that seeing where Dylan and the others had died would provide me with a revelation, some insight. I hoped I would walk into the room and understand something vital about the events of that day, and about Dylan’s state of mind, and I tried to set my sorrow aside so I could receive any truth occupying the space.

The moment I walked into the room, everything fell silent. I could no longer hear the repairs being made in the hallway. I sensed only two things before I was overtaken by tears. I felt the presence of children, and I felt peace.

The police led us to the place where Eric and Dylan had shot themselves. My heart caught when I saw the long, lean, angular shape marked out on the floor. Of course that was Dylan; it looked just like him. My tears splashed the floor. Byron’s gentle hand was on my back as I knelt beside the shape resembling my son and touched the carpet that held him when he fell.





CHAPTER 9


Life with Grief


Quote in the paper about cancer patients. It said “The people who do well create a place in their mind and their spirit where they are well, and they live from that place.” This is what we are doing. Tom’s analogy is that a tornado has destroyed our house, and we can only live in one part of it. This is what living with grief is like. You dwell in that small place where you can function.

—Journal entry, August 1999





The theologian C. S. Lewis begins A Grief Observed, his beautiful meditation on the death of his wife, with these words: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”

Years later, those words still hit me with the full weight of the unassailably true. Any loved one’s death, especially the death of a child, shakes you at your very foundation. As Iris Bolton, a suicide loss survivor and author, has written, “I thought I was immortal, that my children and my family were also, that tragedy happened only to others.” We need to believe this in order to survive, and the truth laid bare can be terrifying. For me, the incomprehensibility of the way Dylan died magnified these feelings of instability at the foundation of my identity by throwing everything I believed to be true about the life I’d lived, about my family, and about myself into question.